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ALBERT ADSIT CLEMONS
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V)6 SuruLi
VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE
AND OTHER PAPERS
[Aut^r's Edition\
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
AN INLAND VOYAGE.
EDINBURGH.
TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY.
VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE.
FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS.
NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS.
TREASURE ISLAND.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS.
A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES.
PRINCE OTTO.
STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.
KIDNAPPED.
THE MERRY MEN AND OTHER TALES AND FABLES.
UNDERWOODS.
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS.
MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN.
(WITH MRS. STEVENSON.)
MORE NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS: The Dynamiter.
VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE
AND OTHER PAPERS
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
SECOND EDITION
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1887
[ All rights reserved ]
?^^.t
Bequest
Albert Adsit Clemons
Aug. 24, 1938
(Not available for exchans©)
My dear William Ernest Henley,
We are all busy in this world building
Towers of Babel ; and the child of our imaginations
is always a changeling when it comes from nurse.
This is not only true in the greatest, as of wars and
folios, but in the least also, like the trifling volume in
your hand. Thus I began to write these papers with
a definite end : I was to be the Advocafus, not I hope
Diabolic but Juventutis j I was to state temperately
the beliefs of youth as opposed to the contentions of
age ; to go over all the field where the two differ, and
produce at last a little volume of special pleadings
which I might call, without misnomer, Life at Twenty-
Jive. But times kept changing, and I shared in the
change. I clung hard to that entrancing age ; but,
with the best will, no man can be twenty-five for ever.
The old, ruddy convictions deserted me, and, along
with them, the style that fits their presentation and
defence. I saw, and indeed my friends informed me,
that the game was up. A good part of the volume
would answer to the long-projected title ; but the
shadows of the prison-house are on the rest.
vi Dedication
It is good to have been young in youth and, as
years go on, to grow older. Many are already old
before they are through their teens ; but to travel
deliberately through one's ages is to get the heart out
of a liberal education. Times change, opinions vary
to their opposite, and still this world appears a brave
gymnasium, full of sea-bathing, and horse exercise,
and bracing, manly virtues ; and what can be more
encouraging than to find the friend who was welcome
at one age, still welcome at another ? Our affections
and beliefs are wiser than we ; the best that is in us
is better than we can understand ; for it is grounded
beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe,
from one age on to another.
These papers are like milestones on the wayside
of my hfe ; and as I look back in memory, there is
hardly a stage of that distance but I see you present
with advice, reproof, or praise. Meanwhile, many
things have changed, you and I among the rest ; but
I hope that our sympathy, founded on the love of our
art, and nourished by mutual assistance, shall survive
these little revolutions undiminished, and, with God's
help, unite us to the end.
R. L. S.
Davos Platz, i88i.
CONTENTS
" ViRGINIBUS PUERISQUE "
I
II
I
• 25
III. On Falling in Love.
44
IV. Truth of Intercourse
63
Crabbed Age and Youth
81
An Apology for Idlers .
107
Ordered South ....
128
^s Triplex
153
El Dorado
172
The English Admirals .
179
Some Portraits by Raeburn .
205
Child's Play
222
Walking Tours ....
245
Pan's Pipes
262
A Plea for Gas Lamps . . . .
271
"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE"
"\1 riTH the single exception of Falstafif,
all Shakespeare's characters are what
we call marrying men. Mercutio, as he was
own cousin to Benedick and Biron, would
have come to the same end in the long run.
Even lago had a wife, and, what is far
stranger, he was jealous. People like Jacques
and the Fool in Lear, although we can
hardly imagine they would ever marry, kept
single out of a cynical humour or for a
broken heart, and not, as we do nowadays,
from a spirit of incredulity and preference
for the single state. For that matter, if you
turn to George Sand's French version of As
Yoic Like It (and I think I can promise you
2 '' Virginibiis Puerisque "
will like it but little), you will find Jacquei
marries Celia just as Orlando marries Rosalind.
At least there seems to have been much
less hesitation over marriage in Shakespeare's
days ; and what hesitation there was was of
a laughing sort, and not much more serious,
one way or the other, than that of Pan urge.
In modern comedies the heroes are mostly
of Benedick's way of thinking, but twice as
much in earnest, and not one quarter so
confident. And I take this diffidence as a
proof of how sincere their terror is. They
know they are only human after all ; they
know what gins and pitfalls lie about their
feet ; and how the shadow of matrimony
waits, resolute and awful, at the cross-roads.
They would wish to keep their liberty ; but
if that may not be, why, God's will be done !
" What, are you afraid of marriage ?" asks
Cecile, in Maitre Gueriii. " Oh, mon Dieu,
non !" replies Arthur ; '' I should take
chloroform." They look forward to mar-
riage much in the same way as they prepare
themselves for death : each seems inevitable ;
''Virginibiis Puerisque''' 3
each is a great Perhaps, and a leap into the
dark, for which, when a man is in the blue
devils, he has specially to harden his heart.
That splendid scoundrel, Maxime de Trailles,
took the news of marriages much as an old
man hears the deaths of his contemporaries.
** C'est desesperant," he cried, throwing him-
self down in the arm-chair at Madame
Schontz's ; " c'est desesperant, nous nous
marions tous !" Every marriage was like
another gray hair on his head ; and the jolly
church bells seemed to taunt him with his
fifty years and fair round belly.
The fact is, we are much more afraid of
life than our ancestors, and cannot find it in
our hearts either to marry or not to marry.
Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and
forlorn old age. The friendships of men are
vastly agreeable, but they are insecure. You
know all the time that one friend will marry
and put you to the door ; a second accept a
situation in China, and become no more to
you than a name, a reminiscence, and an
occasional crossed letter, very laborious to
4 ** Virginibus Puertsgue "
read ; a third will take up with some religious
crotchet and treat you to sour looks thence-
forward. So, in one way or another, life
forces men apart and breaks up the goodly
fellowships for ever. The very flexibility
and ease which make men's friendships so
agreeable while they endure, make them the
easier to destroy and forget. And a man
who has a few friends, or one who has a
dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this
earth), cannot forget on how precarious a
base his happiness reposes ; and how by a
stroke or two of fate — a death, a few light
words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's
bright eyes — he may be left, in a month,
destitute of all. Marriage is certainly a
perilous remedy. Instead of on two or three,
you stake your happiness on one life only.
But still, as the bargain is more explicit and
complete on your part, it is more so on the
other ; and you have not to fear so many
contingencies ; it is not every wind that can
blow you from your anchorage ; and so long
as Death withholds his sickle, you will always
" Virginibtis Puerisque " 5
have a friend at home. People who share a
cell in the Bastile, or are thrown together on
an uninhabited isle, if they do not immedi-
ately fall to fisticuffs, will find some possible
ground of compromise. They will learn each
other's ways and humours, so as to know
where they must go warily, and where they
may lean their whole weight The discretion
of the first years becomes the settled habit of
the last ; and so, with wisdom and patience,
two lives may grow indissolubly into one.
But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all
heroic. It certainly narrows and damps the
spirits of generous men. In marriage, a man
becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a
fatty degeneration of his moral being. It is
not only when Lydgate misallies himself with
Rosamond Vincy, but when Ladislaw marries
above him with Dorothea, that this may be
exemplified. The air of the fireside withers
out all the fine wildings of the husband's
heart. He is so comfortable and happy that
he begins to prefer comfort and happiness to
everything else on earth, his wife included.
6 ** Virginibus Puerisque "
Yesterday he would have shared his last
shilling ; to-day " his first duty is to his
family," and is fulfilled in large measure by
laying down vintages and husbanding the
health of an invaluable parent. Twenty
years ago this man was equally capable of
crime or heroism ; now he is fit for neither.
His soul is asleep, and you may speak with-
out constraint ; you will not wake him. It
is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a
bachelor and Marcus Aurelius married ill.
For women, there is less of this danger.
Marriage is of so much use to a woman,
opens out to her so much more of life, and
puts her in the way of so much more freedom
and usefulness, that, whether she marry ill
or well, she can hardly miss some benefit.
It is true, however, that some of the merriest
and most genuine of women are old maids ;
and that those old maids, and wives who are
unhappily married, have often most of the
true motherly touch. And this would seem
to show, even for women, some narrowing
influence in comfortable married life. But
*' Virginibus Ptierisqtte " 7
the rule is none the less certain : if you wish
the pick of men and women, take a good
bachelor and a good wife.
I am often filled with wonder that so
many marriages are passably successful, and
so few come to open failure, the more so as
I fail to understand the principle on which
people regulate their choice. \ see women
marrying indiscriminately with staring bur-
gesses and ferret-faced, white-eyed boys, and
men dwell in contentment with noisy scullions,
or taking into their lives acidulous vestals.
It is a common answer to say the good
people marry because they fall in love ; and
of course you may use and misuse a word as
much as you please, if you have the world
along with you. But love is at least a some-
what hyperbolical expression for such luke-
warm preference. It is not here, anyway, that
Love employs his golden shafts ; he cannot
be said, with any fitness of language, to reign
here and revel. Indeed, if this be love at
all, it is plain the poets have been fooling
with mankind since the foundation of the
8 ** Virginibus Pue^Hsque "
world. And you have only to look these
happy couples in the face, to see they have
never been in love, or in hate, or in any
other high passion, all their days. When
you see a dish of fruit at dessert, you some-
times set your affections upon one particular
peach or nectarine, watch it with some anxiety
as it comes round the table, and feel quite a
sensible disappointment when it is taken by
some one else. I have used the phrase
" high passion." Well, I should say this was
about as high a passion as generally leads to
marriage. One husband hears after marriage
that some poor fellow is dying of his wife's
love. *' What a pity!" he exclaims; "you
know I could so easily have got another!"
And yet that is a very happy union. Or
again : A young man was telling me the
sweet story of his loves. " I like it well
enough as long as her sisters are there," said
this amorous swain ; " but I don't know«
what to do when we're alone." Once more :
A married lady was debating the subject
with another lady. "You know, dear," said
" Virginibus Puerisgue " 9
the first, " after ten years of marriage, if he
is nothing else, your husband is always an
old friend." " I have many old friends,"
returned the other, " but I prefer them to be
nothing more." " Oh, perhaps I vrnght prefer
that also !" There is a common note in
these three illustrations of the modern idyll ;
and it must be owned the god goes among us
with a limping gait and blear eyes. You
wonder whether it was so always ; whether
desire was always equally dull and spiritless,
and possession equally cold. I cannot help
fancying most people make, ere they marry,
some such table of recommendations as
Hannah Godwin wrote to her brother William
anent her friend, Miss Gay. It is so charm-
ingly comical, and so pat to the occasion,
that I must quote a few phrases. "The
young lady is in every sense formed to make
one of your disposition really happy. She
has a pleasing voice, with which she accom-
panies her musical instrument with judgment.
She has an easy politeness in her manners,
neither free nor reserved. She is a good
10 " Virginibus Puerisque "
housekeeper and a good economist, and yet
of a generous disposition. As to her internal
accomplishments, I have reason to speak still
more highly of them : good sense without
vanity, a penetrating judgment without a
disposition to satire, with about as much
religion as my William likes, struck me with
a wish that she was. my William's wife."
That is about the tune : pleasing voice,
moderate good looks, unimpeachable internal
accomplishments after the style of the copy-
book, with about as much religion as my
William likes ; and then, with all speed, to
church.
To deal plainly, if they only married when
they fell in love, most people would die
unwed ; and among the others, there would
be not a few tumultuous households. The
Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is scarcely
suitable for a domestic pet. In the same
way, I suspect love is rather too violent a
passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic
sentiment. Like other violent excitements,
it throws up not only what is best, but what
** Virgmibus Puerisque'' 1 1
is worst and smallest, in men's characters.
Just as some people are malicious in drink,
or brawling and virulent under the influence
of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous,
and exacting when they are in love, who
are honest, downright, good -hearted fellows
enough in the everyday affairs and humours
of the world.
How then, seeing we are driven to the
hypothesis that people choose in compara-
tively cold blood, how is it they choose so
well ? One is almost tempted to hint that
it does not much matter whom you marry ;
that, in fact, marriage is a subjective affec-
tion, and if you have made up your mind to
it, and once talked yourself fairly over, you
could " pull it through " with anybody. But
even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even
if we regard it as no more than a sort of
friendship recognised by the police, there
must be degrees in the freedom and sym-
pathy realised, and some principle to guide
simple folk in their selection. Now what
should this principle be? Are there no
1 2 ** Virginibus Puerisqiie "
more definite rules than are to be found in
the Prayer-book ? Law and religion forbid
the bans on the ground of propinquity or
consanguinity ; society steps in to separate
classes ; and in all this most critical matter,
has common sense, has wisdom, never a
word to say? In the absence of more
magisterial teaching, let us talk it over
between friends : even a few guesses may be
of interest to youths and maidens.
In all that concerns eating and drinking,
company, climate, and ways of life, com-
munity of taste is to be sought for. It
would be trying, for instance, to keep bed
and board with an early riser or a vegetarian.
In matters of art and intellect, I believe it
is of no consequence. Certainly it is of
none in the companionships of men, who
will dine more readily with one who has a
good heart, a good cellar, and a humorous
tongue, than with another who shares all
their favourite hobbies and is melancholy
withal. If your wife likes Tupper, that is
no reason why you should hang your head.
" Virgiiiibus Puerisque " 13
She thinks with the majority, and has the
courage of her opinions. I have always
suspected public taste to be a mongrel pro-
duct, out of affectation by dogmatism ; and
felt sure, if you could only find an honest
man of no special literary bent, he would tell
you he thought much of Shakespeare bom-
bastic and most absurd, and all of him
written in very obscure English and weari-
some to read. And not long ago I was
able to lay by my lantern in content, for I
found the honest man. He was a fellow of
parts, quick, humorous, a clever painter, and
with an eye for certain poetical effects of
sea and ships. I am not much of a judge
of that kind of thing, but a sketch of his
comes before me sometimes at night. How
strong, supple, and living the ship seems
upon the billows ! With what a dip and
rake she shears the flying sea ! I cannot
fancy the man who saw this effect, and took
it on the wing with so much force and spirit,
was what you call commonplace in the last
recesses of the heart. And yet he thought,
14 " Virginibtis Puerisqite "
and was not ashamed to have it known of
him, that Ouida was better in every way
than William Shakespeare. If there were
more people of his honesty, this would be
about the staple of lay criticism. It is not
taste that is plentiful, but courage that is
rare. And what have we in place ? How
many, who think no otherwise than the
young painter, have we not heard disbursing
second-hand hyperboles ? Have you never
turned sick at heart, O best of critics ! when
some of your own sweet adjectives were
returned on you before a gaping audience?
Enthusiasm about art is become a function
of the average female being, which she per-
forms with precision and a sort of haunting
sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-
regulated machine. Sometimes, alas ! the
calmest man is carried away in the torrent^
bandies adjectives with the best, and out-
Herods Herod for some shameful moments.
When you remember that, you will be
tempted to put things strongly, and say you
will marry no one who is not like George
" Virginibus Puerisqite " 1 5
the Second, and cannot state openly a dis-
taste for poetry and painting-.
The word " facts " is, in some ways, crucial.
I have spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth
Brethren, mathematicians and poets, dogmatic
republicans and dear old gentlemen in bird's-
eye neckcloths ; and each understood the
word " facts " in an occult sense of his own.
Try as I might, I could get no nearer the
principle of their division. What was essen-
tial to them, seemed to me trivial or untrue.
We could come to no compromise as to
what was, or what was not, important in the
life of man. Turn as we pleased, we all
stood back to back in a big ring, and saw
another quarter of the heavens, with different
mountain-tops along the sky-line and different
constellations overhead. We had each of us
some whimsy in the brain, which we believed
more than anything else, and which dis-
coloured all experience to its own shade.
How would you have people agree, when
one is deaf and the other blind ? Now this
is where there should be community between
1 6 " Virginlbus Puerisque "
man and wife. They should be agreed on
their catchword in ^^ facts of religion" or
"facts of science" or "society, my dear"; for
without such an agreement all intercourse is
a painful strain upon the mind. " About as
much religion as my William likes," in short,
that is what is necessary to make a happy
couple of any William and his spouse. For
there are differences which no habit nor
affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian
must not intermarry with the Pharisee.
Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budget,
the wife of the successful merchant ! The
best of men and the best of women may
sometimes live together all their lives, and,
for want of some consent on fundamental
questions, hold each other lost spirits to the
end.
A certain sort of talent is almost indis-
pensable for people who would spend years
together and not bore themselves to death.
But the talent, like the agreement, must be
for and about life. To dwell happily
together, they should be versed in the
" Virginibus Puerisque " 17
niceties of the heart, and born with a faculty
for willing compromise. The woman must
be talented as a woman, and it will not
much matter although she is talented in
nothing else. She must know her metier de
femmey and have a fine touch for the affec-
tions. And it is more important that a
person should be a good gossip, and talk
pleasantly and smartly of common friends
and the thousand and one nothings of the
day and hour, thaA that she should speak
with the tongues of men and angels ; for a
while together by the fire, happens more
frequently in marriage than the presence of
a distinguished foreigner to dinner. That
people should laugh over the same sort of
jests, and have many a story of " grouse in
the gun-room," many an old joke between
them which time cannot wither nor custom
stale, is a better preparation for life, by your
leave, than many other things higher and
better sounding in the world's ears. You
could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted ;
but you must share a joke with some one
1 8 * * Virgin ibtis Puerisque
else. You can forgive people who do not
follow you through a philosophical disquisi-
tion ; but to find your \vife laughing when
you had tears in your eyes, or staring when
you were in a fit of laughter, would go some
way towards a dissolution of the marriage.
I know a woman who, from some distaste
or disability, could never so much as under-
stand the meaning of the word politics, and
has given up trying to distinguish Whigs
from Tories ; but tak^ her on her own
politics, ask her about other men or women
and the chicanery of everyday existence —
the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which
life turns — and you will not find many more
shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to
make plainer what I have in mind, this same
woman has a share of the higher and more
poetical understanding, frank interest in
things for their own sake, and enduring
astonishment at the most common. She is
not to be deceived by custom, or made to
think a mystery solved when it is repeated.
I have heard her say she could wonder her-
" Vh^giiiibus Puerisque " 19
self crazy over the human eyebrow. Now
in a world where most of us walk very con-
tentedly in the little lit circle of their own
reason, and have to be reminded of what lies
without by specious and clamant exceptions
— earthquakes, eruptions of Vesuvius, banjos
floating in mid-air at a seance, and the like
— a mind so fresh and unsophisticated is no
despicable gift. I will own I think it a
better sort of mind than goes necessarily
with the clearest views on public business.
It will wash. It will find something to say
at an odd moment. It has in it the spring
of pleasant and quaint fancies. Whereas I
can imagine myself yawning all night long
until my jaws ached and the tears came into
my eyes, although my companion on the
other side of the hearth held the most en-
lightened opinions on the franchise or the
ballot.
The question of professions, In as far as
they regard marriage, was only interesting
to women until of late days, but it touches
all of .us now. Certainly, if I could help it,
2 o " Virginibus Puerisq ue ' '
I would never marry a wife who wrote.
The practice of letters is miserably harassing
to the mind ; and after an hour or two's
work, all the more human portion of the
author is extinct ; he will bully, backbite,
and speak daggers. Music, I hear, is not
much better. But painting, on the contrary,
is often highly sedative ; because so much
of the labour, after your picture is once
begun, is almost entirely manual, and of that
skilled sort of manual labour which offers a
continual series of successes, and so tickles
a man, through his vanity, into good humour.
Alas ! in letters there is nothing of this sort.
You may write as beautiful a hand as you
will, you have always something else to think
of, and cannot pause to notice your loops
and flourishes ; they are beside the mark,
and the first law stationer could put you to
the blush. Rousseau, indeed, made some
account of penmanship, even made it a
source of livelihood, when he copied out the
Helo'ise for dilettante ladies ; and therein
showed that strange eccentric prudence which
** Virginibus Puerisque " 21
guided him among so many thousand follies
and insanities. It would be well for all of
the genus irritabile thus to add something of
skilled labour to intangible brain-work. To
find the right word is so doubtful a success
and lies so near to failure, that there is no
satisfaction in a year of it ; but we all know
when we have formed a letter perfectly ;
and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is almost
equally certain he has found a right tone or
a right colour, or made a dexterous stroke
with his brush. And, again, painters may
work out of doors ; and the fresh air, the
deliberate seasons, and the " tranquillising
influence " of the green earth, counterbalance
the fever of thought, and keep them cool,
placable, and prosaic.
A ship captain is a good man to marry if
it is a marriage of love, for absences are a
good influence in love and keep it bright
and delicate ; but he is just the worst
man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as
habit is too frequently torn open and the
solder has never time to set. Men who fish,
22 ** Virgtntdus Puerisque "
botanise, work with the turning-lathe, or
gather sea-weeds, will make admirable hus-
bands ; and a little amateur painting in
water-colour shows the innocent and quiet
mind. Those who have a few intimates are
to be avoided ; while those who swim loose,
who have their hat in their hand all along
the street, who can number an infinity of
acquaintances and are not chargeable with
any one friend, promise an easy disposition
and no rival to the wife's influence. I will
not say they are the best of men, but they
are the stufl' out of which adroit and capable
women manufacture the best of husbands.
It is to be noticed that those who have loved
once or twice already are so much the better
educated to a woman's hand ; the bright boy
of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable
mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs
a deal of civilising. Lastly (and this is,
perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should
marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not
smoke. It is not for nothing that this
" ignoble tabagie," as Michelet calls it, spreads
' * Virginibus Puerisque " 23
over all the world. Michelet rails against
it because it renders you happy apart from
thought or work ; to provident women this
will seem no evil influence in married life.
Whatever keeps a man in the front garden,
whatever checks wandering fancy and all
inordinate ambition, whatever makes for
lounging and contentment, makes just so
surely for domestic happiness.
These notes, if they amuse the reader at
all, will probably amuse him more when he
differs than when he agrees with them ; at
least they will do no harm, for nobody will
follow my advice. But the last word is of
more concern. Marriage is a step so grave
and decisive that it attracts light-headed^
variable men by its very awfulness. They
have been so tried among the inconstant
squalls and currents, so often sailed for
islands in the air or lain becalmed with
burning heart, that they will risk all for solid
ground below their feet. Desperate pilots,
they run their sea-sick, weary bark upon the
dashing rocks. It seems as if marriage were
24 * ' Virginibus Puerisque
the royal road through life, and realised, on
the instant, what we have all dreamed on
summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at
night when we cannot sleep for the desire of
living. They think it will sober and change
them. Like those who join a brotherhood,
they fancy it needs but an act to be out of
the coil and clamour for ever. But this
is a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring
winds will sow disquietude, passing faces
leave a regret behind them, and the whole
world keep calling and calling in their ears.
For marriage is like life in this — that it is a
field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
* ' Virginibus Puerisqiie " 25
II
Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of
our existence. From first to last, and in the
face of smarting disillusions, we continue to
expect good fortune, better health, and better
conduct ; and that so confidently, that we
judge it needless to deserve them. I think
it improbable that I shall ever write like
Shakespeare, conduct an army like Hannibal,
or distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in
the paths of virtue ; and yet I have my by-
days, hope prompting, when I am very ready
to believe that I shall combine all these
various excellences in my own person, and
go marching down to posterity with divine
honours. There is nothing so monstrous but
we can believe it of ourselves. About our-
selves, about our aspirations and delinquencies,
26 " Virgmibus Puerisque
we have dwelt by choice in a delicious vague-
ness from our boyhood up. No one will
have forgotten Tom Sawyer's aspiration :
"Ah, if he could only die temporarily T
Or, perhaps, better still, the inward resolution
of the two pirates, that "so long as they
remained in that business, their piracies
should not again be sullied with the crime of
stealing." Here we recognise the thoughts
of our boyhood ; and our boyhood ceased —
well, when ? — not, I think, at twenty ; nor,
perhaps, altogether at twenty-five ; nor yet
at thirty ; and possibly, to be quite frank, we
are still in the thick of that arcadian period.
For as the race of man, after centuries of
civilisation, still keeps some traits of their
barbarian fathers, so man the individual is
not altogether quit of youth, when he is
already old and honoured, and Lord Chan-
cellor of England. We advance in years
somewhat in the manner of an invading
army in a barren land ; the age that we have
reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold
with an outpost, and still keep open our
' ' Virginibus Puerisque " 27
communications with the extreme rear and
first beginnings of the march. There is our
true base ; that is not only the beginning,
but the perennial spring of our faculties ; and
grandfather William can retire upon occasion
into the green enchanted forest of his boy-
hood.
The unfading boyishness of hope and its
vigorous irrationality are nowhere better dis-
played than in questions of conduct. There
is a character in the Pilgrim's Progress ^ one
Mr. Linger-after- Lust with whom I fancy we
are all on speaking terms ; one famous among
the famous for ingenuity of hope up to and
beyond the moment of defeat ; one who,
after eighty years of contrary experience, will
believe it possible to continue in the business
of piracy and yet avoid the guilt of theft.
Every sin is our last ; every ist of January
a remarkable turning-point in our career.
Any overt act, above all, is felt to be alchemic
in its power to change. A drunkard takes
the pledge ; it will be strange if that does
not help him. For how many years did Mr.
2 8 ' * VirginibMS Puerisque
Pepys continue to make and break his little
vows? And yet I have not heard that he
was discouraged in the end. By such steps
we think to fix a momentary resolution ; as
a timid fellow hies him to the dentist's while
the tooth is stinging.
But, alas, by planting a stake at the top
of flood, you can neither prevent nor delay
the inevitable ebb. There is no hocus-pocus
in morality ; and even the " sanctimonious
ceremony " of marriage leaves the man un-
changed. This is a hard saying, and has an
air of paradox. For there is something in
marriage so natural and inviting, that the
step has an air of great simplicity and ease ;
it offers to bury for ever many aching pre-
occupations ; it is to afford us unfailing and
familiar company through life ; it opens up a
smiling prospect of the blest and passive kind
of love, rather than the blessing and active ;
it is approached not only through the delights
of courtship, but by a public performance
and repeated legal signatures. A man
naturally thinks it will go hard with him if
* * Virginibus Puerisque " 29
he cannot be good and fortunate and happy
within such august circumvallations.
And yet there is probably no other act in
a man's Hfe so hot-headed and foolhardy as
this one of marriage. For years, let us
suppose, you have been making the most
indifferent business of your career. Your ex-
perience has not, we may dare to say, been
more encouraging than Paul's or Horace's ;
like them, you have seen and desired the good
that you were not able to accomplish ; like
them, you have done the evil that you
loathed. You have waked at night in a hot
or a cold sweat, according to your habit of
body, remembering, with dismal surprise,
your own unpardonable acts and sayings.
You have been sometimes tempted to with-
draw entirely from this game of life ; as a
man who makes nothing but misses with-
draws from that less dangerous one of billiards.
You have fallen back upon the thought that
you yourself most sharply smarted for your
misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive phrase,
that you were nobody's enemy but your own.
30 * * Virginibus Puerisque
And then you have been made aware of
what was beautiful and amiable, wise and
kind, in the other part of your behaviour ;
and it seemed as if nothing could reconcile
the contradiction, as indeed nothing can. If
you are a man, you have shut your mouth
hard and said nothing ; and if you are only
a man in the making, you have recognised
that yours was quite a special case, and you
yourself not guilty of your own pestiferous
career.
Granted, and with all my heart. Let us
accept these apologies ; let us agree that you
are nobody's enemy but your own ; let us
agree that you are a sort of moral cripple,
impotent for good ; and let us regard you
with the unmingled pity due to such a fate.
But there is one thing to which, on these
terms, we can never agree : — we can never
agree to have you marry. What! you have
had one life to manage, and have failed so
strangely, and now can see nothing wiser
than to conjoin with it the management of
some one else's ? Because you have been
** Virginibus Puerisque " 31
unfaithful in a very little, you propose your-
self to be a ruler over ten cities. You strip
yourself by such a step of all remaining con-
solations and excuses. You are no longer
content to be your own enemy ; you must be
your wife's also. You have been hitherto in
a mere subaltern attitude ; dealing cruel
blows about you in life, yet only half respon-
sible, since you came there by no choice or
movement of your own. Now, it appears,
you must take things on your own authority :
God made you, but you marry yourself; and
for all that your wife suffers, no one is respon-
sible but you. A man must be very certain
of his knowledge ere he undertake to guide
a ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous
pass ; you have eternally missed your way in
life, with consequences that you still deplore,
and yet you masterfully seize your wife's
hand, and, blindfold, drag her after you to
ruin. And it is your wife, you observe,
whom you select. She, whose happiness you
most desire, you choose to be your victim.
You would earnestly warn her from a totter-
32 * ' Virginibus Puerisque ' '
ing bridge or bad investment. If she were
to marry some one else, how you would
tremble for her fate ! If she were only your
sister, and you thought half as much of her,
how doubtfully would you entrust her future
to a man no better than yourself!
Times are changed with him who marries;
there are no more by-path meadows, where
you may innocently linger, but the road lies
long and straight and dusty to the grave.
Idleness, which is often becoming and even
wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a differ-
ent aspect when you have a wife to support.
Suppose, after you are married, one of those
little slips were to befall you. What happened
last November might surely happen February
next. They may have annoyed you at the
time, because they were not what you had
meant ; but how will they annoy you in the
future, and how will they shake the fabric of
your wife's confidence and peace ! A thou-
sand things unpleasing went on in the chiar-
oscuro of a life that you shrank from too
particularly realising ; you did not care, in
* ' Virginibus Puerisque " 33
those days, to make a fetish of your con-
science ; you would recognise your failures
with a nod, and so, good day. But the time
for these reserves is over. You have wilfully
introduced a witness into your life, the scene
of these defeats, and can no longer close the
mind's eye upon uncomely passages, but
must stand up straight and put a name upon
your actions. And your witness is not only
the judge, but the victim of your sins ; not
only can she condemn you to the sharpest
penalties, but she must herself share feelingly
in their endurance. And observe, once more,
with what temerity you have chosen precisely
her to be your spy, whose esteem you value
highest, and whom you have already taught
to think you better than you are. You may
think you had a conscience, and believed in
God ; but what is a conscience to a wife ?
Wise men of yore erected statues of their
deities, and consciously performed their part
in life before those marble eyes. A god
watched them at the board, and stood by
their bedside in the morning when they
D
34 ' ' Virginibus Puerisque "
woke ; and all about their ancient cities,
where they bought and sold, or where they
piped and wrestled, there would stand some
symbol of the things that are outside of man.
These were lessons, delivered in the quiet
dialect of art, which told their story faithfully,
but gently. It is the same lesson, if you
will — but how harrowingly taught ! — when
the woman you respect shall weep from your
unkindness or blush with shame at your mis-
conduct. Poor girls in Italy turn their
painted Madonnas to the wall : you cannot
set aside your wife. To marry is to domes-
ticate the Recording Angel. Once you are
married, there is nothing left for you, not
even suicide, but to be good.
And goodness in marriage is a more
intricate problem than mere single virtue ;
for in marriage there are two ideals to be
realised. A girl, it is true, has always lived
in a glass house among reproving relatives,
whose word was law ; she has been bred up
to sacrifice her judgments and take the key
submissively from dear papa ; and it is won-
* ' Virginibus Puerisque " 35
derful how swiftly she can change her tune
into the husband's. Her morality has been,
too often, an affair of precept and conformity.
But in the case of a bachelor who has
enjoyed some measure both of privacy and
freedom, his moral judgments have been
passed in some accordance with his nature.
His sins were always sins in his own sight ;
he could then only sin when he did some
act against his clear conviction ; the light
that he walked by was obscure, but it was
single. Now, when two people of any grit
and spirit put their fortunes into one, there
succeeds to this comparative certainty a huge
welter of competing jurisdictions. It no
longer matters so much how life appears to
one ; one must consult another : one, who
may be strong, must not offend the other,
who is weak. The only weak brother I am
willing to consider is (to make a bull for
once) my wife. For her, and for her only, I
must waive my righteous judgments, and go
crookedly about my life. How, then, in
such an atmosphere of compromise, to keep
36 '' Virginibus Puerisque^^
honour bright and abstain from base capitu-
lations ? How are you to put aside love's
pleadings ? How are you, the apostle of
laxity, to turn suddenly about into the rabbi
of precision ; and after these years of ragged
practice, pOse for a hero to the lackey who
has found you out ? In this temptation to
mutual indulgence lies the particular peril to
morality in married life. Daily they drop a
little lower from the first ideal, and for a
while continue to accept these changelings
with a gross complacency. At last Love
wakes and looks about him ; finds his hero
sunk into a stout old brute, intent on brandy
pawnee ; finds his heroine divested of her
angel brightness ; and in the flash of that
first disenchantment, flees for ever.
Again, the husband, in these unions, is
usually a man, and the wife commonly
enough a woman ; and when this is the case,
although it makes the firmer marriage, a
thick additional veil of misconception hangs
above the doubtful business. Women, I
believe, are somewhat rarer than men ; but
'' Virginibus Puerisque'' 37
then, if I were a woman myself, I daresay I
should hold the reverse ; and at least we all
enter more or less wholly into one or other
of these camps. A man who delights
women by his feminine perceptions will
often scatter his admirers by a chance
explosion of the under side of man ; and the
most masculine and direct of women will
some day, to your dire surprise, draw out
like a telescope into successive lengths of
personation. Alas ! for the man, knowing
her to be at heart more candid than himself,
who shall flounder, panting, through these
mazes in the quest for truth. The proper
qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally
surprising to the other. Between the Latin
and the Teuton races there are similar diver-
gences, not to be bridged by the most liberal
sympathy. And in the good, plain, cut-and-
dry explanations of this life, which pass
current among us as the wisdom of the
elders, this difficulty has been turned with
the aid of pious lies. Thus, when a young
lady has angelic features, eats nothing to
38 *' Virginibus Puerisque "
speak ' of, plays all day long on the piano,
and sings ravishingly in church, it requires
a rough infidelity, falsely called cynicism, to
believe that she may be a little devil after
all. Yet so it is : she may be a tale-bearer,
a liar, and a thief; she may have a taste for
brandy, and no heart. My compliments to
George Eliot for her Rosamond Vincy ; the
ugly work of satire she has transmuted to
the ends of art, by the companion figure of
Lydgate ; and the satire was much wanted
for the education of young men. That
doctrine of the excellence of women, however
chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false. It
is better to face the fact, and know, when
you marry, that you take into your life a
creature of equal, if of unlike, frailties ; whose
weak human heart beats no more tunefully
than yours.
But it is the object of a liberal education
not only to obscure the knowledge of one
sex by another, but to magnify the natural
differences between the two. Man is a
creature who lives not upon bread alone, but
" Virginibus Puerisque " 39
principally by catchwords ; and the little rift
between the sexes is astonishingly widened
by simply teaching one set of catchwords to
the girls and another to the boys. To the
first, there is shown but a very small field of
experience, and taught a very trenchant
principle for judgment and action ; to the
other, the world of life is more largely dis-
played, and their rule of conduct is propor-
tionally widened. They are taught to follow
different virtues, to hate different vices, to
place their ideal, even for each other, in
different achievements. What should be the
result of such a course ? When a horse has
run away, and the two flustered people in
the gig have each possessed themselves of a
rein, we know the end of that conveyance
will be in the ditch. So, when I see a raw
youth and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in
a dancing measure into that most serious
contract, and setting out upon life's journey
with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am
not surprised that some make shipwreck, but
that any come to port. What the boy does
40 ** Virginibus Ptterisque "
almost proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the
girl will shudder at as a debasing vice ; what
is to her the mere common sense of tactics,
he will spit out of his mouth as shameful.
Through such a sea of contrarieties must this
green couple steer their way ; and contrive
to love each other ; and- to respect, forsooth ;
and be ready, when the time arrives, to
educate the little men and women who shall
succeed to their places and perplexities.
And yet, when all has been said, the man
who should hold back from marriage is in
the same case with him who runs away from
battle. To avoid an occasion for our virtues
is a worse degree of failure than to push
forward pluckily and make a fall. It is
lawful to pray God that we be not led into
temptation ; but not lawful to skulk from
those that come to us. The noblest passage
in one of the noblest books of this century,
is where the old pope glories in the trial, nay,
in the partial fall and but imperfect triumph,
of the younger hero.^ Without some such
1 Browning's Ring and Book,
** Virginibus Puerisque " 41
manly note, it were perhaps better to have
no conscience at all. But there is a vast
difference between teaching flight, and show-
ing points of peril that a man may march
the more warily. And the true conclusion
of this paper is to turn our back on appre-
hensions, and embrace that shining and
courageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy,
a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to
chase swallows with the salt ; Faith is the
grave, experienced, yet smiling man. Hope
lives on ignorance ; open-eyed Faith is built
upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny
of circumstance and the frailty of human
resolution. Hope looks for unqualified
success ; but Faith counts certainly on
failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a
form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan ;
but Faith grew up in Christian days, and
early learnt humility. In the one temper, a
man is indignant that he cannot spring up
in a clap to heights of elegance and virtue ;
in the other, out of a sense of his infirmities,
he is filled with confidence because a year
42 " Virginibus Ptierisque "
has come and gone, and he has still preserved
some rags of honour. In the first, he expects
an angel for a wife ; in the last, he knows
that she is like himself — erring, thoughtless,
and untrue ; but like himself also, filled with
a struggling radiancy of better things, and
adorned with ineffective qualities. You may
safely go to school with hope ; but ere you
marry, should have learned the mingled
lesson of the world : that dolls are stuffed
with sawdust, and yet are excellent play-
things ; that hope and love address them-
selves to a perfection never realised, and yet,
firmly held, become the salt and staff of life ;
that you yourself are compacted of infirmities,
perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and
yet you have a something in you lovable and
worth preserving ; and that, while the mass
of mankind lies under this scurvy condemna-
tion, you will scarce find one but, by some
generous reading, will become to you a lesson,
a model, and a noble spouse through life.
So thinking, you will constantly support
your own unworthiness, and easily forgive
" Virginibus Puerisque " 43
the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be
wisely glad that you retain the sense of
blemishes ; for the faults of married people
continually spur up each of them, hour by
hour, to do better and to meet and love
upon a higher ground. And ever, between
the failures, there will come glimpses of kind
virtues to encourage and console.
44 " Virginibus Puerisque "
III._ON FALLING IN LOVE
" Lord, what fools these mortals be !"
There is only one event in life which really
astonishes a man and startles him out of his
prepared opinions. Everything else befalls
him very much as he expected. Event
succeeds to event, with an agreeable variety
indeed, but with little that is either startling
or intense ; they form together no more than
a sort of background, or running accompani-
ment to the man's own reflections ; and he
falls naturally into a cool, curious, and smiling
habit of mind, and builds himself up in a
conception of life which expects to-morrow
to be after the pattern of to-day and yester-
day. He may be accustomed to the vagaries
of his friends and acquaintances under the
influence of love. He may sometimes look
^'^Virginibus Pueristpie'^ 45
forward to it for himself with an incompre-
hensible expectation. But it is a subject in
which neither intuition nor the behaviour of
others will help the philosopher to the truth.
There is probably nothing rightly thought or
rightly written on this matter of love that is
not a piece of the person's experience. I
remember an anecdote of a well-known
French theorist, who was debating a point
eagerly in his cenacle. It was objected
against him that he had never experienced
love. Whereupon he arose, left the society,
and made it a point not to return to it until
he considered that he had supplied the defect.
" Now," he remarked, on entering, " now I
am in a position to continue the discussion."
Perhaps he had not penetrated very deeply
into the subject after all ; but the story in-
dicates right thinking, and may serve as an
apologue to readers of this essay.
When at last the scales fall from his eyes,
it is not without something of the nature of
dismay that the man finds himself in such
changed conditions. He has to deal with
46 ** Virginibus Puerisque "
commanding emotions instead of the easy
dislikes and preferences in which he has
hitherto passed his days ; and he recognises
capabilities for pain and pleasure of which
he had not yet suspected the existence.
Falling in love is the one illogical adventure,
the one thing of which we are tempted to
think as supernatural, in our trite and reason-
able world. The effect is out of all proportion
with the cause. Two persons, neither of
them, it may be, very amiable or very
beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a
little into each other's eyes. That has been
done a dozen or so of times in the experience
of either with no great result. But on this
occasion all is different. They fall at once
into that state in which another person
becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint
of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious
theories with a smile ; in which our ideas
are so bound up with the one master-thought
that even the trivial cares of our own person
become so many acts of devotion, and the
love of life itself is translated into a wish to
* ' Virgin ihts Puerisque " 47
remain in the same world with so precious
and desirable a fellow-creature. And all
the while their acquaintances look on in
stupor, and ask each other, with almost
passionate emphasis, what so-and-so can see
in that woman, or such-an-one in that man ?
I am sure, gentlemen, I cannot tell you.
For my part, I cannot think what the women
mean. It might be very well, if the Apollo
Belvedere should suddenly glow all over into
life, and step forward from the pedestal with
that godlike air of his. But of the misbe-
gotten changelings who call themselves men,
and prate intolerably over dinner-tables, I
never saw one who seemed worthy to inspire
love — no, nor read of any, except Leonardo
da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe in his youth.
About women I entertain a somewhat differ-
ent opinion ; but there, I have the misfortune
to be a man.
There are many matters in which you
may waylay Destiny, and bid him stand and
deliver. Hard work, high thinking, adven-
turous excitement, and a great deal more
48 " Virginibus Puertsque
that forms a part of this or the other person's
spiritual bill of fare, are within the reach of
almost any one who can dare a little and be
patient. But it is by no means in the way
of every one to fall in love. You know the
difficulty Shakespeare was put into when
Queen Elizabeth asked him to show Falstaff
in love. I do not believe that Henry Fielding
was ever in love. Scott, if it were not for a
passage or two in Rob Roy, would give me
very much the same effect. These are great
names and (what is more to the purpose)
strong, healthy, high-strung, and generous
natures, of whom the reverse might have
been expected. As for the innumerable
army of anaemic and tailorish persons who
occupy the face of this planet with so much
propriety, it is palpably absurd to imagine
them in any such situation as a love-affair.
A wet rag goes safely by the fire ; and if a
man is blind, he cannot expect to be much
impressed by rom.antic scenery. Apart from
all this, many lovable people miss each other
in the world, or meet under some unfavour-
^^Virginihts Puerisque'' 49
able star. There is the nice and critical
moment of declaration to be got over. From
timidity or lack of opportunity a good half
of possible love cases never get so far, and
at least another quarter do there cease and
determine. A very adroit person, to be sure,
manages to prepare the way and out with
his declaration in the nick of time. And
then there is a fine solid sort of man, who
goes on from snub to snub ; and if he has to
declare forty times, will continue imperturb-
ably declaring, amid the astonished considera-
tion of men and angels, until he has a
favourable answer. I daresay, if one were
a woman, one would like to marry a man
who was capable of doing this, but not quite
one who had done so. It is just a little bit
abject, and somehow just a little bit gross ;
and marriages in which one of the parties
has been thus battered into consent scarcely
form agreeable subjects for meditation. Love
should run out to meet love with open arms.
Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people
who go into love step for step, with a fluttered
so ^'Virginibus Puerisque "
consciousness, like a pair of children ventur-
ing together into a dark room. From the
first moment when they see each other, with
a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage
of growing pleasure and embarrassment, they
can read the expression of their own trouble
in each other's eyes. There is here no decla-
ration properly so called ; the feeling is so
plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows
what it is in his own heart, he is sure of what
it is in the woman's.
This simple accident of falling in love is
as beneficial as it is astonishing. It arrests
the petrifying influence of years, disproves
cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and
awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the
man had found it a good policy to disbelieve
the existence of any enjoyment which was
out of his reach ; and thus he turned his
back upon the strong sunny parts of nature,
and accustomed himself to look exclusively
on what was common and dull. He accepted
a prose ideal, let himself go blind of many
sympathies by disuse ; and if he were young
*' Virginibus Fuerisque " 51
and witty, or beautiful, wilfully forewent
these advantages. He joined himself to the
following of what, in the old mythology of
love, was prettily called nonchaloir ; and in
an odd mixture of feelings, a fling of self-
respect, a preference for selfish liberty, and
a great dash of that tear with which honest
people regard serious interests, kept himself
back from the straightforward course of life
among certain selected activities. And now,
all of a sudden, he is unhorsed, like St. Paul,
from his infidel affectation. His heart, which
has been ticking accurate seconds for the
last year, gives a bound and begins to beat
high and irregularly in his breast. It seems
as if he had never heard or felt or seen until
that moment ; and by the report of his
memory, he must have lived his past life
between sleep and waking, or with the pre-
occupied attention of a brown study. He is
practically incommoded by the generosity of
his feelings, smiles much when he is alone,
and develops a habit of looking rather blankly
upon the moon and stars. But it is not at
52 " Virginibus Puerisque '*
all within the province of a prose essayist to
give a picture of this hyperbolical frame of
mind ; and the thing has been done already,
and that to admiration. In Adelaide, in
Tennyson's Maud, and in some of Heine's
songs, you get the absolute expression of
this midsummer spirit. Romeo and Juliet
were very much in love ; although they tell
me some German critics are of a different
opinion, probably the same who would have
us think Mercutio a dull fellow. Poor
Antony was in love, and no mistake. That
lay figure Marius, in Les Miserables, is also a
genuine case in his own way, and worth
observation. A good many of George Sand's
people are thoroughly in love ; and so are a
good many of George Meredith's. Altogether,
there is plenty to read on the subject. If
the root of the matter be in him, and if he
has the requisite chords to set in vibration,
a young man may occasionally enter, with
the key of art, into that land of Beulah which
is upon the borders of Heaven and within
sight of the City of Love. There let him
" Virginibus Ptterisque " 53
sit awhile to hatch delightful hopes and
perilous illusions.
One thing that accompanies the passion
in its first blush is certainly difficult to ex-
plain. It comes (I do not quite see how)
that from having a very supreme sense of
pleasure in all parts of life — in lying down
to sleep, in waking, in motion, in breathing,
in continuing to be — the lover begins to
regard his happiness as beneficial for the
rest of the world and highly meritorious in
himself Our race has never been able con-
tentedly to suppose that the noise of its wars,
conducted by a few young gentlemen in a
corner of an inconsiderable star, does not re-
echo among the courts of Heaven with quite
a formidable effect. In much the same taste,
when people find a great to-do in their own
breasts, they imagine it must have some in-
fluence in their neighbourhood. The presence
of the two lovers is so enchanting to each
other that it seems as if it must be the best
thing possible for everybody else. They are
half inclined to fancy it is because of them
54 " Virgmibus Puerisque
and • their love that the sky is blue and the
sun shines. And certainly the weather is
usually fine while people are courting. . . .
In point of fact, although the happy man
feels very kindly towards others of his own
sex, there is apt to be something too much
of the magnifico in his demeanour. If people
grow presuming and self-important over such
matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they
will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in
life without some suspicion of a strut ; and
the dizziest elevation is to love and be loved
in return. Consequently, accepted lovers
are a trifle condescending in their address to
other men. An overweening sense of the
passion and importance of life hardly con-
duces to simplicity of manner. To women,
they feel very nobly, very purely, and very
generously, as if they were so many Joan-of-
Arc's ; but this does not come out in their
behaviour ; and they treat them to Grandi-
sonian airs marked with a suspicion of fatuity.
I am not quite certain that women do not
like this sort of thing ; but really, after having
'< Virginibus Puerisque " 55
bemused myself over Daniel Deronda, I have
given up trying to understand what they like.
If it did nothing else, this sublime and
ridiculous superstition, that the pleasure of
the pair is somehow blessed to others, and
everybody is made happier in their happiness,
would serve at least to keep love generous
and great-hearted. Nor is it quite a baseless
superstition after all. Other lovers are
hugely interested. They strike the nicest
balance between pity and approval, when
they see people aping the greatness of their
own sentiments. It is an understood thing
in the play, that while the young gentlefolk
are courting on the terrace, a rough flirtation
is being carried on, and a light, trivial sort
of love is growing up, between the footman
and the singing chambermaid. As people
are generally cast for the leading parts in
their own imaginations, the reader can apply
the parallel to real life without much chance
of going wrong. In short, they are quite
sure this other love-affair is not so deep-
seated as their own, but they like dearly to
56 ** Virginibtis Puerisque "
see it going forward. And love, considered
as a spectacle, must have attractions for
many who are not of the confraternity. The
sentimental old maid is a commonplace of
the novelists ; and he must be rather a poor
sort of human being, to be sure, who can
look on at this pretty madness without in-
dulgence and sympathy. For nature com-
mends itself to people with a most insinuating
art; the busiest is now and again arrested
by a great sunset ; and you may be as
pacific or as cold-blooded as you will, but
you cannot help some emotion when you
read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair
of lovers in the lane.
Certainly, whatever it may be with regard
to the world at large, this idea of beneficent
pleasure is true as between the sweethearts.
To do good and communicate is the lover's
grand intention. It is the happiness of the
other that makes his own most intense
gratification. It is not possible to disentangle
the different emotions, the pride, humility,
pity and passion, which are excited by a
" Virginious Puerisque " 5 ;
look of happy love or an unexpected caress.
To make one's self beautiful, to dress the hair,
to excel in talk, to do anything and all
things that puff out the character and attri-
butes and make them imposing in the eyes
of others, is not only to magnify one's self,
but to offer the most delicate homage at the
same time. And it is in this latter intention
that they are done by lovers ; for the essence
of love is kindness ; and indeed it may be
best defined as passionate kindness : kind-
ness, so to speak, run mad and become
importunate and violent. Vanity in a merely
personal sense exists no longer. The lover
takes a perilous pleasure in privately dis-
playing his weak points and having them,
one after another, accepted and condoned.
He wishes to be assured that he is not loved
for this or that good quality, but for himself,
or something as like himself as he can
contrive to set forward. For, although it
may have been a very difficult thing to paint
the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act
of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more
58 '' Virginibus Puerisque "
difficult piece of art before every one in this
world who cares to set about explaining his
own character to others. Words and acts
are easily wrenched from their true signifi-
cance ; and they are all the language we
have to come and go upon. A pitiful job we
make of it, as a rule. For better or worse,
people mistake our meaning and take our
emotions at a wrong valuation. And gener-
ally we rest pretty content with our failures ;
we are content to be misapprehended by cack-
ling flirts ; but when once a man is moonstruck
with this affection of love, he makes it a
point of honour to clear such dubieties away.
He cannot have the Best of her Sex misled
upon a point of this importance ; and his
pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.
He discovers a great reluctance to return
on former periods of his life. To all that
has not been shared with her, rights and
duties, bygone fortunes and dispositions, he
can look back only by a difficult and repug-
nant effort of the will. That he should have
wasted some years in ignorance of what
** Virginibus Ptierisque " 5 9
alone was really important, that he may-
have entertained the thought of other women
with any show of complacency, is a burthen
almost too heavy for his self-respect. But
it is the thought of another past that rankles
in his spirit like a poisoned wound. That
he himself made a fashion of being alive in
the bald, beggarly days before a certain
meeting, is deplorable enough in all good
conscience. But that She should have per-
mitted herself the same liberty seems incon-
sistent with a Divine providence.
A great many people run down jealousy,
on the score that it is an artificial feeling, as
well as practically inconvenient. This is
scarcely fair ; for the feeling on which it
merely attends, like an ill-humoured courtier,
is itself artificial in exactly the same sense
and to the same degree. I suppose what is
meant by that objection is that jealousy has
not always been a character of man ; formed
no part of that very modest kit of sentiments
with which he is supposed to have begun the
world ; but waited to make its appearance
6 o " Virgin ibus Puerisqtie
in better days and among richer natures
And this is equally true of love, and friend-
ship, and love of country, and delight in
what they call the beauties of nature, and
most other things worth having. Love, in
particular, will not endure any historical
scrutiny : to all who have fallen across it, it
is one of the most incontestable facts in the
world ; but if you begin to ask what it was
in other periods and countries, in Greece for
instance, the strangest doubts begin to spring
up, and everything seems so vague and
changing that a dream is logical in compari-
son. Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the
consequences of love ; you may like it or
not, at pleasure ; but there it is.
It is not exactly jealousy, however, that
we feel when we reflect on the past of those
we love. A bundle of letters found after
years of happy union creates no sense of
insecurity in the present ; and yet it will
pain a man sharply. The two people enter-
tain no vulgar doubt of each other : but this
pre-existence of both occurs to the mind as
** Virginibus Puerisque " 61
something indelicate. To be altogether right,
they should have had twin birth together, at
the same moment with the feeling that unites
them. Then indeed it would be simple and
perfect and without reserve or afterthought.
Then they would understand each other with
a fulness impossible otherwise. There would
be no barrier between them of associations
that cannot be imparted. They would be
led into none of those comparisons that send
the blood back to the heart. And they
would know that there had been no time
lost, and they had been together as much as
was possible. For besides terror for the
separation that must follow some time or
other in the future, men feel anger, and
something like remorse, when they think of
that other separation which endured until
they met. Some one has written that love
makes people believe in immortality, because
there seems not to be room enough in life
for so great a tenderness, and it is inconceiv-
able that the most masterful of our emotions
should have no more than the spare moments
62 " Virgiiiibtts Puerisque "
of a few years. Indeed, it seems strange ;
but if we call to mind analogies, we can
hardly regard it as impossible.
" The blind bow-boy," who smiles upon us
from the end of terraces in old Dutch gardens,
laughingly hails his bird-bolts among a fleet-
ing generation. But for as fast as ever he
shoots, the game dissolves and disappears
into eternity from under his falling arrows ;
this one is gone ere he is struck ; the other
has but time to make one gesture and give
one passionate cry ; and they are all the
things of a moment. When the generation
is gone, when the play is over, when the
thirty years' panorama has been withdrawn
in tatters from the stage of the world, we
may ask what has become of these great,
weighty, and undying loves, and the sweet-
hearts who despised mortal conditions in a
fine credulity ; and they can only show us a
few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions
worth remembering, and a few children who
have retained some happy stamp from the
disposition of their parents.
^'Virginibus Puerisqzce'' 63
IV.— TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE
Among sayings that have a currency in spite
of being wholly false upon the face of them
for the sake of a half-truth upon another
subject which is accidentally combined with
the error, one of the grossest and broadest
conveys the monstrous proposition that it is
easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie.
I wish heartily it were. But the truth is
one ; it has first to be discovered, then justly
and exactly uttered. Even with instruments
specially contrived for such a purpose — with
a foot rule, a level, or a theodolite — it is not
easy to be exact ; it is easier, alas ! to be
inexact. From those who mark the divi-
sions on a scale to those who measure the
boundaries of empires or the distance of the
heavenly stars, it is by careful method and
64 " Virginibus Puerisque "
minute, unwearying attention that men rise
even to material exactness or to sure know-
ledge even of external and constant things.
But it is easier to draw the outline of a
mountain than the changing appearance of a
face ; and truth in human relations is of this
more intangible and dubious order : hard to
seize, harder to communicate. Veracity to
facts in a loose, colloquial sense — not to say
that I have been in Malabar when as a matter
of fact I was never out of England, not to
say that I have read Cervantes in the original
when as a matter of fact I know not one
syllable of Spanish — this, indeed, is easy and
to the same degree unimportant in itself.
Lies of this sort, according to circumstances,
may or may not be important ; in a certain
sense even they may or may not be false.
The habitual liar may be a very honest
fellow, and live truly with his wife and
friends ; while another man who never told
a formal falsehood in his life may yet be
himself one He — heart and face, from top to
bottom. This is the kind of lie which
f * Virghiibus Puerisque " 65
poisons intimacy. And, vice versa, veracity
to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to
your own heart and your friends, never to
feign or falsify emotion — that is the truth
which makes love possible and mankind
happy.
L'art de bien dire is but a drawing-room
accomplishment unless it be pressed into the
service of the truth. The difficulty of litera-
ture is not to write, but to write what you
mean ; not to affect your reader, but to
affect him precisely as you wish. This is
commonly understood in the case of books
or set orations ; even in making your will, or
writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is
admitted by the world. But one thing you
can never make Philistine natures under-
stand ; one thing, which yet lies on the
surface, remains as unseizable to their wits
as a high flight of metaphysics — namely, that
the business of life is mainly carried on by
means of this difficult art of literature, and
according to a man's proficiency in that art
shall be the freedom and the fulness of his
F
66 * ' Virgm ibus Ptterisque
intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is
supposed, can say what he means ; and, in
spite of their notorious experience to the
contrary, people so continue to suppose.
Now, I simply open the last book I have
been reading — Mr. Leland's captivating Eng-
lish Gipsies. " It is said," I find on p. 7,
" that those who can converse with Irish
peasants in their own native tongue form far
higher opinions of their appreciation of the
beautiful, and of the elements of humour and
pathos in their hearts, than do those who
know their thoughts only through the
medium of English. I know from my own
observations that this is quite the case with
the Indians of North America, and it is
unquestionably so with the gipsy." In short,
where a man has not a full possession of the
language, the most important, because the
most amiable, qualities of his nature have to
lie buried and fallow ; for the pleasure of
comradeship, and the intellectual part of love,
rest upon these very " elements of humour
and pathos." Here is a man opulent in
* * Virgin ibus Puerisque " 67
both, and for lack of a medium he can put
none of it out to interest in the market of
affection ! But what is thus made plain to
our apprehensions in the case of a foreign
language is partially true even with the
tongue we learned in childhood. Indeed, we
all speak different dialects ; one shall be
copious and exact, another loose and meagre;
but the speech of the ideal talker shall cor-
respond and fit upon the truth of fact — not
clumsily, obscuring lineaments, like a mantle,
but cleanly adhering, like an athlete's skin.
And what is the result ? That the one can
open himself more clearly to his friends, and
can enjoy more of what makes life truly
valuable — intimacy with those he loves. An
orator makes a false step ; he employs some
trivial, some absurd, some vulgar phrase ; in
the turn of a sentence he insults, by a side
wind, those whom he is labouring to charm ;
in speaking to one sentiment he unconsciously
ruffles another in parenthesis ; and you are
not surprised, for you know his task to be
delicate and filled with perils. " O frivolous
6S " Virginilms Puerisque "
mind of man, light ignorance !" As if your-
self, when you seek to explain some mis-
understanding or excuse some apparent fauit,
speaking swiftly and addressing a mind still
recently incensed, were not harnessing for a
more perilous adventure ; as if yourself
required less tact and eloquence ; as if an
angry friend or a suspicious lover were not
more easy to offend than a meeting ot
indifferent politicians ! Nay, and the orator
treads in a beaten round ; the matters he
discusses have been discussed a thousand
times before ; language is ready -shaped to
his purpose ; he speaks out of a cut and dry
vocabulary. But you — may it not be that
your defence reposes on some subtlety of
feeling, not so much as touched upon in
Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer,
you must venture forth into zones of thought
still unsurveyed, and become yourself a
literary innovator ? For even in love there
are unlovely humours ; ambiguous acts, un-
pardonable words, may yet have sprung from
a kind sentiment. If the injured one could
** Virginibus Puerisque " 69
read your heart, you may be sure that he
would understand and pardon ; but, alas !
the heart cannot be shown — it has to be
demonstrated in words. Do you think it is
a hard thing to write poetry ? Why, that is
to write poetry, and of a high, if not the
highest, order.
I should even more admire " the lifelong
and heroic literary labours" of my fellow-
men, patiently clearing up in words their
loves and their contentions, and speaking
their autobiography daily to their wives, were
it not for a circumstance which lessens their
difficulty and my admiration by equal parts.
For life, though largely, is not entirely carried
on by literature. We are subject to physical
passions and contortions ; the voice breaks
and changes, and speaks by unconscious and
winning inflections ; we have legible coun-
tenances, like an open book ; things that
cannot be said look eloquently through the
eyes ; and the soul, not locked into the body
as a dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold
with appealing signals. Groans and tears,
70 " Virgin ibus Puerisque
looks and gestures, a flush or a paleness, are
often the most clear reporters of the heart,
and speak more directly to the hearts of
others. The message flies by these inter-
preters in the least space of time, and the
misunderstanding is averted in the moment
of its birth. To explain in words takes time
and a just and patient hearing ; and in the
critical epochs of a close relation, patience
and justice are not qualities on which we
can rely. But the look or the gesture
explains things in a breath ; they tell their
message without ambiguity ; unlike speech,
they cannot stumble, by the way, on a re-
proach or an allusion that should steel your
friend against the truth ; and then they have
a higher authority, for they are the direct
expression of the heart, not yet transmitted
through the unfaithful and sophisticating
brain. Not long ago I wrote a letter to a
friend which came near involving us in
quarrel ; but we met, and in personal talk I
repeated the worst of what I had written,
and added worse to that ; and with the com-
" Virginibus Puerisque " 71
mentary of the body it seemed not unfriendly
either to hear or say. Indeed, letters are in
vain for the purposes of intimacy ; an absence
is a dead break in the relation ; yet two who
know each other fully and are bent on per-
petuity in love, may so preserve the attitude
of their affections that they may meet on the
same terms as they had parted.
Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot
read the face ; pitiful that of the deaf, who
cannot follow the changes of the voice. And
there are others also to be pitied ; for there
are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who
have been denied all the symbols of com-
munication, who have neither a lively play
of facial expression, nor speaking gestures,
nor a responsive voice, nor yet the gift of
frank, explanatory speech : people truly
made of clay, people tied for life into a bag
which no one can undo. They are poorer
than the gipsy, for their heart can speak no
language under heaven. Such people we
must learn slowly by the tenor of their acts,
or through yea and nay communications ; or
72 " Virginibus Puerisque ' '
we take them on trust on the strength of a
general air, and now and again, when we see
the spirit breaking through in a flash, correct
or change our estimate. But these will be
uphill intimacies, without charm or freedom,
to the end ; and freedom is the chief ingredi-
ent in confidence. Some minds, romantically
dull, despise physical endowments. That is
a doctrine for a misanthrope ; to those who
like their fellow-creatures it must always be
meaningless ; and, for my part, I can see few
things more desirable, after the possession of
such radical qualities as honour and humour
and pathos, than to have a lively and not a
stolid countenance ; to have looks to corre-
spond with every feeling ; to be elegant and
delightful in person, so that we shall please
even in the intervals of active pleasing, and
may never discredit speech with uncouth
manners or become unconsciously our own
burlesques. But of all unfortunates there is
one creature (for I will not call him man)
conspicuous in misfortune. This is he who
has forfeited his birthright of expression, who
* * Virginibus Puerisque " 73
has cultivated artful intonations, who has
taught his face tricks, like a pet monkey, and
on every side perverted or cut off his means
of communication with his fellow-men. The
body is a house of many windows : there we
all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the
passers-by to come and love us. But this
fellow has filled his windows with opaque
glass, elegantly coloured. His house may be
admired for its design, the crowd may pause
before the stained windows, but meanwhile
the poor proprietor must lie languishing
within, uncomforted, unchangeably alone.
Truth of intercourse is something more
difficult than to refrain from open lies. It is
possible to avoid falsehood and yet not tell
the truth. It is not enough to answer formal
questions. To reach the truth by yea and
nay communications implies a questioner
with a share of inspiration, such as is often
found in mutual love. Yea and nay mean
nothing; the meaning must have been related
in the question. Many words are often
necessary to convey a very simple statement;
74 * * Virgin ibus Puerisque ' '
for in this sort of exercise we never hit the
gold ; the most that we can hope is by many
arrows, more or less far off on different sides,
to indicate, in the course of time, for what
target we are aiming, and after an hour's
talk, back and forward, to convey the purport
of a single principle or a single thought.
And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses
the point entirely, a wordy, prolegomenous
babbler will often add three new offences in
the process of excusing one. It is really a
most delicate affair. The world was made
before the English language, and seemingly
upon a different design. Suppose we held
our converse not in words, but in music ;
those who have a bad ear would find them-
selves cut off from all near commerce, and
no better than foreigners in this big world.
But we do not consider how many have " a
bad ear " for words, nor how often the most
eloquent find nothing to reply. I hate ques-
tioners and questions ; there are so few that
can be spoken to without a lie. ^^ Do you
forgive me?'' Madam and sweetheart, so far
" Virgiiiibits Puerisque " 75
as I have gone in life I have never yet been
able to discover what forgiveness means.
" Js it still the same between us?'' Why,
how can it be ? It is eternally different ;
and yet you are still the friend of my heart.
^^ Do yoit undcrstana me?'' God knows; I
should think it highly improbable.
The cruellest lies are often told in silence.
A man may have sat in a room for hours
and not opened his teeth, and yet come out
of that room a disloyal friend or a vile
calumniator. And how many loves have
perished because, from pride, or spite, or
diffidence, or that unmanly shame which
withholds a man from daring to betray
emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the
relation, has but hung his head and held his
tongue ? And, again, a lie may be told by
a truth, or a truth conveyed through a lie.
Truth to facts is not always truth to senti-
ment ; and part of the truth, as often happens
in answer to a question, may be the foulest
calumny. A fact may be an exception ;
but the feeling is the law, and it is that
^6 *' Virginibus Puerisqiie "
which you must neither garble nor belie.
The whole tenor of a conversation is a part
of the meaning of each separate statement ;
the beginning and the end define and travesty
the intermediate conversation. You never
speak to God ; you address a fellow-man,
full of his own tempers ; and to tell truth,
rightly understood, is not to state the true
facts, but to convey a true impression ; truth
in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true
veracity. To reconcile averted friends a
Jesuitical discretion is often needful, not so
much to gain a kind hearing as to communi-
cate sober truth. Women have an ill name
in this connection ; yet they live in as true
relations ; the lie of a good woman is the
true index of her heart.
" It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest
and most useful passage I remember to have
read in any modern author,^ " two to speak
truth — one to speak and another to hear."
He must be very little experienced, or have
1 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers^ Wednes-
day, p. 283.
* ' Virginibus Puerisque " 77
no great zeal for truth, who does not re-
cognise the fact. A grain of anger or a
grain of suspicion produces strange acoustical
effects, and makes the ear greedy to remark
offence. Hence we find those who have
once quarrelled carry themselves distantly,
and are ever ready to break the truce. To
speak truth there must be moral equality or
else no respect ; and hence between parent
and child intercourse is apt to degenerate
into a verbal fencing bout, and misappre-
hensions to become ingrained. And there
is another side to this, for the parent begins
with an imperfect notion of the child's
character, formed in early years or during
the equinoctial gales of youth ; to this he
adheres, noting only the facts which suit
with his preconception ; and wherever a
person fancies himself unjustly judged, he
at once and finally gives up the effort to
speak truth. With our chosen friends, on
the other hand, and still more between
lovers (for mutual understanding is love's
essence), the truth is easily indicated by the
78 '' Virginibus Puerisque''
one and aptly comprehended by the other.
A hint taken, a look understood, conveys
the gist of long and delicate explanations ;
and where the life is known even yea and
nay become luminous. In the closest of all
relations — that of a love well founded and
equally shared — speech is half discarded,
like a roundabout, infantile process or a
ceremony of formal etiquette ; and the two
communicate directly by their presences,
and with few looks and fewer words contrive
to share their good and evil and uphold each
other's hearts in joy. For love rests upon
a physical basis ; it is a familiarity of nature's
making and apart from voluntary choice.
Understanding has in some sort outrun
knowledge, for the affection perhaps began
with the acquaintance ; and as it was not
made like other relations, so it is not, like
them, to be perturbed or clouded. Each
knows more than can be uttered ; each lives
by faith, and believes by a natural compul-
sion ; and between man and wife the
language of the body is largely developed
" Virginibus Puerisque " 79
and grown strangely eloquent. The thought
that prompted and was conveyed in a caress
would only lose to be set down in words —
ay, although Shakespeare himself should be
the scribe.
Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond
all others, that we must strive and do battle
for the truth. Let but a doubt arise, and
alas ! all the previous intimacy and confid-
ence is but another charge against the person
doubted. " What a monstrous dishonesty is
this if I have been deceived so long and so
completely r Let but that thought gain
entrance, and you plead before a deaf tri-
bunal. Appeal to the past ; why, that is
your crime ! Make all clear, convince the
reason ; alas ! speciousness is but a proof
against you. ^^ If you can abuse me now, the
more likely that you have abused me from
the first"
For a strong affection such moments are
worth supporting, and they will end well ;
for your advocate is in your lover's heart
and speaks her own language ; it is not you
8o " Virginibus Puerisqtie "
but she herself who can defend and clear
you of the charge. But in slighter intimacies,
and for a less stringent union ? Indeed, is
it worth while ? We are all incompris, only
more or less concerned for the mischance ;
all trying wrongly to do right ; all fawning
at each other's feet like dumb, neglected
lap-dogs. Sometimes we catch an eye —
this is our opportunity in the ages — and we
wag our tail with a poor smile. ''Is that
all?'' All? If you only knew ! But how-
can they know ? They do not love us ; the
more fools we to squander life on the in-
different.
But the morality of the thing, you will
be glad to hear, is excellent ; for it is only
by trying to understand others that we can
get our own hearts understood ; and in
matters of human feeling the clement judge
is the most successful pleader.
CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH
"You know my mother now and then argues very
notably ; always veiy warmly at least. I happen often to
differ from her ; and we both think so well of our own
arguments, that we very seldom are so happy as to convince
one another. A pretty common case, I believe, in all
veJmnent debatings. She says, I am too witty ; Anglice,
too pert ; I, that she is too wise ; that is to say, being Hke-
wise put into English, not so young as she has been''' — Miss
Howe to Miss Harlowe, Clarissa^ vol. ii. Letter xiii.
nPHERE is a strong feeling in favour of
cowardly and prudential proverbs. The
sentiments of a man while he is full of ardour
and hope are to be received, it is supposed,
with some qualification. But when the same
person has ignominiously failed and begins
to eat up his words, he should be listened to
like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom
is conceived for the use of mediocre people,
to discourage them from ambitious attempts,
G
82 Crabbed Age and Youth
and generally console them in their medio-
crity. And since mediocre people constitute
the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very
properly so. But it does not follow that the
one sort of proposition is any less true than
the other, or that Icarus is not to be more
praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr.
Samuel Budgett the Successful Merchant.
The one is dead, to be sure, while the other
is still in his counting-house counting out
his money ; and doubtless this is a considera-
tion. But we have, on the other hand, some
bold and magnanimous sayings common to
high races and natures, which set forth the
advantage of the losing side, and proclaim it
better to be a dead lion than a living dog.
It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities
reconcile such sayings with their proverbs.
According to the latter, every lad who goes
to sea is an egregious ass ; never to forget
your umbrella through a long life would seem
a higher and wiser flight of achievement than
to go smiling to the stake ; and so long as
you are a bit of a coward and inflexible in
Crabbed Age and Youth 8 3
money matters, you fulfil the whole duty of
man.
It is a still more difficult consideration for
our average men, that while all their teachers,
from Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin
and the ungodly Binney, have inculcated the
same ideal of manners, caution, and respect-
ability, those characters in history who have
most notoriously flown in the face of such
precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms
of praise, and honoured with public monu-
ments in the streets of our commercial
centres. This is very bewildering to the
moral sense. You have Joan of Arc, who
left a humble but honest and reputable liveli-
hood under the eyes of her parents, to go
a-colonelling, in the company of rowdy
soldiers, against the enemies of France ;
surely a melancholy example for one's
daughters ! And then you have Columbus,
who may have pioneered America, but, when
all is said, was a most imprudent navigator.
His life is not the kind of thing one would
like to put into the hands of young people ;
84 Crabbed Age and Youth
rather, one would do one's utmost to keep it
from their knowledge, as a red flag of adven-
ture and disintegrating influence in life. The
time would fail me if I were to recite all the
big names in history whose exploits are
perfectly irrational and even shocking to the
business mind. The incongruity is speaking;
and I imagine it must engender among the
mediocrities a very peculiar attitude towards
the nobler and showier sides of national life.
They will read of the Charge of Balaclava in
much the same spirit as they assist at a per-
formance of the Lyons Mail. Persons of
substance take in the Times and sit com-
• posedly in pit or boxes according to the
degree of their prosperity in business. As
for the generals who go galloping up
and down among bomb-shells in absurd
cocked hats — as for the actors who raddle
their faces and demean themselves for hire
upon the stage — they must belong, thank
God ! to a different order of beings, whom
we watch as we watch the clouds careering
in the windy, bottomless inane, or read about
Crabbed Age and Youth 8 5
like characters in ancient and rather fabulous
annals. Our offspring would no more think
of copying their behaviour, let us hope, than
of doffing their clothes and painting them-
selves blue in consequence of certain admis-
sions in the first chapter of their school history
of England.
Discredited as they are in practice, the
cowardly proverbs hold their own in theory ;
and it is another instance of the same spirit,
that the opinions of old men about life have
been accepted as final. All sorts of allow-
ances are made for the illusions of youth ;
and none, or almost none, for the disenchant-
ments of age. It is held to be a good taunt,
and somehow or other to clinch the question
logically, when an old gentleman waggles
his head and says : " Ah, so I thought when
I was your age." It is not thought an
answer at all, if the young man retorts :
" My venerable sir, so I shall most probably
think when I am yours." And yet the one
is as good as the other : pass for pass, tit
for tat, a Roland for an Oliver.
S6 Crabbed Age and Youth
"■ Opinion in good men," says Milton, " is
but knowledge in the making." All opinions,
properly so called, are stages on the road to
truth. It does not follow that a man will
travel any further ; but if he has really con-
sidered the world and drawn a conclusion,
he has travelled as far. This does not apply
to formulae got by rote, which are stages on
the road to nowhere but second childhood
and the grave. To have a catchword in
your mouth is not the same thing as to hold
an opinion ; still less is it the same thing as
to have made one for yourself. There are
too many of these catchwords in the world
for people to rap out upon you like an oath
and by way of an argument. They have a
currency as intellectual counters ; and many
respectable persons pay their way with
nothing else. They seem to stand for vague
bodies of theory in the background. The
imputed virtue of folios full of knockdown
arguments is supposed to reside in them,
just as some of the majesty of the British
Empire dwells in the constable's truncheon.
Crabbed Age and Youth Zy
They are used in pure superstition, as old
clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an
exorcism. And yet they are vastly service-
able for checking unprofitable discussion and
stopping the mouths of babes and sucklings.
And when a young man comes to a certain
stage of intellectual growth, the examination
of these counters forms a gymnastic at once
amusing and fortifying to the mind.
Because I have reached Paris, I am not
ashamed of having passed through Newhaven
and Dieppe. They were very good places
to pass through, and I am none the less at
my destination. All my old opinions were
only stages on the way to the one I now
hold, as itself is only a stage on the way to
something else. I am no more abashed
at having been a red-hot Socialist with a
panacea of my own than at having been a
sucking infant. Doubtless the world is quite
right in a million ways ; but you have to be
kicked about a little to convince you of the
fact. And in the meanwhile you must do
something, be something, believe something.
88 Crabbed Age and Youth
It IS not possible to keep the mind in a state
of accurate balance and blank ; and even if
you could do so, instead of coming ultimately
to the right conclusion, you would be very
apt to remain in a state of balance and blank
to perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate
stages, a dash of enthusiasm is not a thing
to be ashamed of in the retrospect : if St.
Paul had not been a very zealous Pharisee,
he would have been a colder Christian. For
my part, I look back to the time when I was
a Socialist with something like regret. I have
convinced myself (for the moment) that we
had better leave these great changes to what
we call great blind forces : their blindness
being so much more perspicacious than the
little, peering, partial eyesight of men. I
seem to see that my own scheme would not
answer ; and all the other schemes I ever
heard propounded would depress some ele-
ments of goodness just as much as \.hey
encouraged others. Now I know that in
thus turning Conservative with years, I am
going through the normal cycle of change
Crabbed Age and Youth 89
and travelling in the common orbit of men's
opinions. I submit to this, as I would
submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomi-
tant of growing age or else of failing animal
heat ; but I do not acknowledge that it
is necessarily a change for the better — I
daresay it is deplorably for the worse. I
have no choice in the business, and can no
more resist this tendency of my mind than
I could prevent my body from beginning to
totter and decay. If I am spared (as the
phrase runs) I shall doubtless outlive some
troublesome desires ; but I am in no hurry
about that ; nor, when the time comes, shall
I plume myself on the immunity. Just in
the same way, I do not greatly pride myself
on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales
of Socialism. Old people have faults of their
own ; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly,
and suspicious. Whether from the growth
of experience or the decline of animal heat,
I see that age leads to these and certain other
faults ; and it follows, of course, that while in
one sense I hope I am journeying towards the
90 Crabbed Age and Youth
truth, in another I am indubitably posting
towards these forms and sources of error.
As we go catching and catching at this or
that corner of knowledge, now getting a fore-
sight of generous possibilities, now chilled
with a glimpse of prudence, we may compare
the headlong course of our years to a swift
torrent in which a man is carried away ; now
he is dashed against a boulder, now he
grapples for a moment to a trailing spray ;
at the end, he is hurled out and overwhelmed
in a dark and bottomless ocean. We have
no more than glimpses and touches ; we are
torn away from our theories ; we are spun
round and round and shown this or the other
view of life, until only fools or knaves can
hold to their opinions. We take a sight at
a condition in life, and say we have studied
it ; our most elaborate view is no more than
an impression. If we had breathing space,
we should take the occasion to modify and
adjust ; but at this breakneck hurry, we are
no sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner
in love than married or jilted, no sooner one
Crabbed Age and Yotith 9 1
age than we begin to be another, and no
sooner in the fulness of our manhood than
we begin to decline towards the grave. It
is in vain to seek for consistency or expect
clear and stable views in a medium so per-
turbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet
science, in which things are tested to a
scruple ; we theorise with a pistol to our
head ; we are confronted with a new set ot
conditions on which we have not only to
pass a judgment, but to take action, before
the hour is at an end. And we cannot even
regard ourselves as a constant ; in this flux
of things, our identity itself seems in a per-
petual variation ; and not infrequently we
find our own disguise the strangest in the
masquerade. In the course of time, we
grow to love things we hated and hate things
we loved. Milton is not so dull as he once
was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so amusing. It
is decidedly harder to climb trees, and not
nearly so hard to sit still. There is no use
pretending ; even the thrice royal game of
hide and seek has somehow lost in zest
92 Crabbed Age and Youth
All our attributes are modified or changed ;
and it will be a poor account of us if our
views do not modify and change in a propor-
tion. To hold the same views at forty as
we held at twenty is to have been stupefied
for a score of years, and take rank, not as a
prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well
birched and none the wiser. It is as if a
ship captain should sail to India from the
Port of London ; and having brought a chart
of the Thames on deck at his first setting
out, should obstinately use no other for the
whole voyage.
And mark you, it would be no less foolish
to begin at Gravesend with a chart of the
Red Sea. Si Jeunesse savait, si Vieillesse
poiivait, is a very pretty sentiment, but not
necessarily right. In five cases out of ten,
it is not so much that the young people do
not know, as that they do not choose. There
is something irreverent in the speculation,
but perhaps the want of power has more to
do with the wise resolutions of age than we
are always willing to admit. It would be
Crabbed Age and Youth 93
an instructive experiment to make an old
man young again and leave him all his
savoir. I scarcely think he would put his
money in the Savings Bank after all ; I
doubt if he would be such an admirable son
as we are led to expect ; and as for his con-
duct in love, I believe firmly he would out-
Herod Herod, and put the whole of his new
compeers to the blush. Prudence is a wooden
Juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin
walks with the portly air of a high priest,
and after whom dances many a successful
merchant in the character of Atys. But it
is not a deity to cultivate in youth. If a
man lives to any considerable age, it cannot
be denied that he laments his imprudences,
but I notice he often laments his youth a
deal more bitterly and with a more genuine
intonation.
It is customary to say that age should be
considered, because it comes last. It seems
just as much to the point, that youth comes
first. And the scale fairly kicks the beam,
if you go on to add that age, in a majority
94 Crabbed Age and Youth
of cases, never comes at all. Disease and
accident make short work of even the most
prosperous persons ; death costs nothing,
and the expense of a headstone is an incon-
siderable trifle to the happy heir. To be
suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambi-
tious schemes, is tragical enough at best ;
but when a man has been grudging himself
his own life in the meanwhile, and saving up
everything for the festival that was never to
be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort
of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce.
The victim is dead — and he has cunningly
overreached himself: a combination of ca-
lamities none the less absurd for being grim.
To husband a favourite claret until the batch
turns sour, is not at all an artful stroke of
policy ; and how much more with a whole
cellar — a whole bodily existence ! People
may lay down their lives with cheerfulness
in the sure expectation of a blessed immor-
tality ; but that is a different affair from
giving up youth with all its admirable
pleasures, in the hope of a better quality ol
Crabbed Age and Youth 95
gruel in a more than problematical, nay,
more than improbable, old age. We should
not compliment a hungry man, who should
refuse a whole dinner and reserve all his
appetite for the dessert, before he knew
whether there was to be any dessert or not.
If there be such a thing as imprudence in
the world, we surely have it here. We sail
in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous
waters ; and to take a cue from the dolorous
old naval ballad, we have heard the mer-
maidens singing, and know that we shall
never see dry land any more. Old and
young, we are all on our last cruise. If
there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for
God's sake pass it round, and let us have a
pipe before we go !
Indeed, by the report of our elders, this
nervous preparation for old age is only
trouble thrown away. We fall on guard,
and after all it is a friend who comes to
meet us. After the sun is down and the
west faded, the heavens begin to fill with
shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort of
96 Crabbed Age and Youth
equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for
the violent ups and downs of passion and
disgust ; the same influence that restrains
our hopes, quiets our apprehensions ; if the
pleasures are less intense, the troubles are
milder and more tolerable ; and in a word,
this period for which we are asked to hoard
up everything as for a time of famine, is, in
its own right, the richest, easiest, and happiest
of life. Nay, by managing its own work and
following its own happy inspiration, youth is
doing the best it can to endow the leisure of
age. A full, busy youth is your only prelude
to a self-contained and independent age ;
and the muff inevitably develops into the bore.
There are not many Doctor Johnsons, to
set forth upon their first romantic voyage at
sixty-four. If we wish to scale Mont Blanc
or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East End,
to go down in a diving dress or up in a
balloon, we must be about it while we are
still young. It will not 'do to delay until we
are clogged with prudence and limping with
rheumatism, and people begin to ask us :
Crabbed Age and Youth 97
"What does Gravity out of bed?" Youth
is the time to go flashing from one end of
the world to the other both in mind and
body ; to try the manners of different
nations ; to hear the chimes at midnight ;
to see sunrise in town and country ; to be
converted at a revival ; to circumnavigate
the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a
mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in
the theatre to applaud Hernani. There is
some meaning in the old theory about wild
oats ; and a man who has not had his green-
sickness and got done with it for good, is as
little to be depended on as an unvaccinated
infant. " It is extraordinary," says Lord
Beaconsfield, one of the brightest and best
preserved of youths up to the date of his last
novel,^ " it is extraordinary how hourly and
how violently change the feelings of an in-
experienced young man." And this mobility
is a special talent entrusted to his care ; a
sort of indestructible virginity ; a magic
armour, with which he can pass unhurt
1 Lothair.
H
98 Crabbed Age and Youth
through great dangers and come unbedaubec
out of the miriest passages. Let him voyage
speculate, see all that he can, do all that he
may ; his soul has as many lives as a cat ,
he will live in all weathers, and never be a
halfpenny the worse. Those who go to the
devil in youth, with anything like a fair
chance, were probably little worth saving
from the first ; they must have been feeble
fellows — creatures made of putty and pack-
thread, without steel or fire, anger or true
joyfulness, in their composition ; we may
sympathise with their parents, but there is
not much cause to go into mourning for
themselves ; for to be quite honest, the weak
brother is the worst of mankind.
When the old man waggles his head and
says, " Ah, so I thought when I was your
age," he has proved the youth's case. Doubt-
less, whether from growth of experience or
decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer;
but he thought so while he was young ; and
all men have thought so while they were
young, since there was dew in the morning
Crabbed Age and Youth 99
or hawthorn in May ; and here is anothei
young man adding his vote to those of pre-
vious generations and rivetting another link
to the chain of testimony. It is as natural
and as right for a young man to be imprudent
and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles,
and beat about his cage like any other wild
thing newly captured, as it is for old men to
turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring,
or heroes to die for something worthier than
their lives.
By way of an apologue for the aged, when
they feel more than usually tempted to offer
their advice, let me recommend the following
little tale. A child who had been remark-
ably fond of toys (and in particular of lead
soldiers) found himself growing to the level
of acknowledged boyhood without any abate-
ment of this childish taste. He was thirteen;
already he had been taunted for dallying
overlong about the playbox ; he had to blush
if he was found among his lead soldiers ; the
shades of the prison-house were closing about
him with a vengeance. There is nothing
100 Crabbed Age and Youth
more difficult than to put the thoughts of
children into the language of their elders ;
but this is the effect of his meditations at
this juncture : " Plainly," he said, " I must
give up my playthings, in the meanwhile,
since I am not in a position to secure myselt
against idle jeers. At the same time, I am
sure that playthings are the very pick of life ;
all people give them up out of the same
pusillanimous respect for those who are a
little older ; and if they do not return to
them as soon as they can, it is only because
they grow stupid and forget. I shall be
wiser ; I shall conform for a little to the
ways of their foolish world ; but so soon as
I have made enough money, I shall retire
and shut myself up among my playthings
until the day I die." Nay, as he was passing
in the train along the Esterel mountains
between Cannes and Frejus, he remarked a
pretty house in an orange garden at the
angle of a bay, and decided that this should
be his Happy Valley. Astrea Redux ;
childhood was to come again ! The idea
Crabbed Age and Youth loi
has an air of simple nobility to me, not
unworthy of Cincinnatus. And yet, as the
reader has probably anticipated, it is never
likely to be carried into effect. There was a
worm i' the bud, a fatal error in the premises.
Childhood must pass away, and then youth, as
surely as age approaches. The true wisdom
is to be always seasonable, and to change
with a good grace in changing circumstances.
To love playthings well as a child, to lead an
adventurous and honourable youth, and to
settle when the time arrives, into a green and
smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and
deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.
You need repent none of your youthful
vagaries. They may have been over the
score on one side, just as those of age are
probably over the score on the other. But
they had a point ; they not only befitted
your age and expressed its attitude and
passions, but they had a relation to what
was outside of you, and implied criticisms on
the existing state of things, v/hich you need
not allow to have been undeserved, because
I02 Crabbed Age and Yoittli
you now see that they were partial. All
error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of
stating that the current truth is incomplete.
The follies of youth have a basis in sound
reason, just as much as the embarrassing
questions put by babes and sucklings. Their
most antisocial acts indicate the defects of
our society. When the torrent sweeps the
man against a boulder, you must expect him
to scream, and you need not be surprised if
the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley,
chafing at the Church of England, discovered
the cure of all evils in universal atheism.
Generous lads irritated at the injustices of
society, see nothing for it but the abolish-
ment of everything and Kingdom Come of
anarchy. Shelley was a young fool ; so are
these cocksparrow revolutionaries. But it is
better to be a fool than to be dead. It is
better to emit a scream in the shape of a
theory than to be entirely insensible to the
jars and incongruities of life and take every-
thing as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.
Some people swallow the universe like a pill ;
Crabbed Age and Youth 103
they travel on through the world, like smiling
images pushed from behind. For God's sake
give me the young man who has brains enough
to make a fool of himself ! As for the others,
the irony of facts shall take it out of their
hands, and make fools of them in downright
earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall
be such a mopping and a mowing at the last
day, and such blushing and confusion of
countenance for all those who have been
wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt
the rough lessons that youth hands on to
age. If we are indeed here to perfect and
complete our own natures, and grow larger,
stronger, and more sympathetic against some
nobler career in the future, we had all best
bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have
the time. To equip a dull, respectable person
with wings would be but to make a parody
of an angel.
In short, if youth is not quite right in its
opinions, there is a strong probability that
age is not much more so. Undying hope is
co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible
104 Cradded Age and Youth
credulity. A man finds he has been wrong
at every preceding stage of his career, only
to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he
is at last entirely right. Mankind, after
centuries of failure, are still upon the eve
of a thoroughly constitutional millennium.
Since we have explored the maze so long
without result, it follows, for poor human
reason, that we cannot have to explore much
longer ; close by must be the centre, with a
champagne luncheon and a piece of orna-
mental water. How if there were no centre
at all, but just one alley after another, and
the whole world a labyrinth without end or
issue ?
I overheard the other day a scrap of con-
versation, which I take the liberty to repro-
duce. "What I advance is true," said one.
" But not the whole truth," answered the
other. " Sir," returned the first (and it
seemed to me there was a smack of Dr.
Johnson in the speech), " Sir, there is no
such thing as the whole truth!" Indeed,
there is nothing so evident in life as that
Crabbed Age and Youth 105
there are two sides to a question. History
is one long illustration. The forces of nature
are engaged, day by day, in cudgelling it
into our backward intelligences. We never
pause for a moment's consideration, but we
admit it as an axiom. An enthusiast sways
humanity exactly by disregarding this great
truth, and dinning it into our ears that this
or that question has only one possible solu-
tion ; and your enthusiast is a fine florid
fellow, dominates things for a while and
shakes the world out of a doze ; but when
once he is gone, an army of quiet and unin-
fluential people set to work to remind us of
the other side and demolish the generous
imposture. While Calvin is putting every-
body exactly right in his Institutes^ and hot-
headed Knox is thundering in the pulpit,
Montaigne is already looking at the other
side in his library in Perigord, and predicting
that they will find as much to quarrel about
in the Bible as they had found already in
the Church. Age may have one side, but
assuredly Youth has the other. There is
1 06 Crabbed Age and Youth
nothing more certain than that both are right,
except perhaps that both are wrong. Let
them agree to differ ; for who knows but
what agreeing to differ may not be a form
of agreement rather than a form of differ-
ence?
I suppose it is written that any one who
sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must con-
tradict himself to his very face. For here
have I fairly talked myself into thinking that
we have the whole thing before us at last ;
that there is no answer to the mystery,
except that there are as many as you please ;
that there is no centre to the maze because,
like the famous sphere, its centre is every-
where ; and that agreeing to differ with
every ceremony of politeness, is the only
" one undisturbed song of pure concent " to
which we are ever likely to lend our musical
voices.
AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
*' BoswELL : We grow weary when idle.
"Johnson : That is, sir, because others being busy, we
want company ; but tf we were idle, there would be no
growing weary; we should all entertain one another."
T UST now, when every one is bound, under
pain of a decree in absence convicting
them of /^j-^-respectability, to enter on some
lucrative profession, and labour therein with
something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry
from the opposite party who are content
when they have enough, and like to look on
and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little
of bravado and gasconade. And yet this
should not be. Idleness so called, which
does not consist in doing nothing, but in
doing a great deal not recognised in the
dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has
I o 8 An Apology for Idlers
as good a right to state its position as
industry itself. It is admitted that the
presence of people who refuse to enter in the
great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is
at once an insult and a disenchantment for
those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so
many) takes his determination, votes for the
sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism,
" goes for " them. And while such an one
is ploughing distressfully up the road, it is
not hard to understand his resentment, when
he perceives cool persons in the meadows by
the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over
their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alex-
ander is touched in a very delicate place by
the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the
glory of having taken Rome for these tumult-
uous barbarians, who poured into the Senate
house, and found the Fathers sitting silent
and unmoved by their success ? It is a sore
thing to have laboured along and scaled the
arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find
humanity indifferent to your achievement.
Hence physicists condemn the unphysical ;
A n Apology for Idlers 109
financiers have only a superficial toleration
for those who know little of stocks ; literary
persons despise the unlettered ; and people
of all pursuits combine to disparage those
who have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the
subject, it is not the greatest. You could
not be put in prison for speaking against
industry, but you can be sent to Coventry
for speaking like a fool. The greatest
difficulty with most subjects is to do them
well ; therefore, please to remember this is
an apology. It is certain that much may
be judiciously argued in favour of diligence ;
only there is something to be said against it,
and that is what, on the present occasion, I
have to say. To state one argument is not
necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that
a man has written a book of travels in
Montenegro, is no reason why he should
never have been to Richmond.
It is surely beyond a doubt that people
should be a good deal idle in youth. For
though here and there a Lord Macaulay may
1 10 An Apology for Idlers
escape from school honours with all his wits
about him, most boys pay so dear for their
medals that they never afterwards have a
shot in their locker, and begin the world
bankrupt. And the same holds true during
all the time a lad is educating himself, or
suffering others to educate him. It must
have been a very foolish old gentleman who
addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words :
" Young man, ply your book diligently now,
and acquire a stock of knowledge ; for when
years come upon you, you will find that
poring upon books will be but an irksome
task." The old gentleman seems to have
been unaware that many other things besides
reading grow irksome, and not a few become
impossible, by the time a man has to use
spectacles and cannot walk without a stick.
Books are good enough in their own way,
but they are a mighty bloodless substitute
for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady
of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your
back turned on all the bustle and glamour of
reality. And if a man reads very hard, as
An Apology for Idlers 1 1 1
the old anecdote reminds us, he will have
little time for thought.
If you look back on your own education,
I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, in-
structive hours of truantry that you regret ;
you would rather cancel some lack-lustre
periods between sleep and waking in the
class. For my own part, I have attended a
good many lectures in my time. I still
remember that the spinning of a top is a
case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember
that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stilli-
cide a crime. But though I would not
willingly part with such scraps of science, I
do not set the same store by them as by
certain other odds and ends that I came by
in the open street while I was playing truant.
This is not the moment to dilate on that
mighty place of education, which was the
favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac,
and turns out yearly many inglorious masters
in the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice
it to say this : if a lad does not learn in the
streets, it is because he has no faculty of
112 An Apology for Idlers
learning. Nor is the truant always in the
streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by
the gardened suburbs into the country. He
may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn,
and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of
the water on the stones. A bird will sing
in the thicket. And there he may fall into
a vein of kindly thought, and see things in
a new perspective. Why, if this be not
education, what is? We may conceive Mr.
Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one,
and the conversation that should thereupon
ensue : —
" How now, young fellow, what dost thou
here ? "
" Truly, sir, I take mine ease."
" Is not this the hour of the class ? and
should'st thou not be plying thy Book with
diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain
knowledge ? "
" Nay, but thus also I follow after Learn-
ing, by your leave."
'* Learning, quotha ! After what fashion,
I pray thee ? Is it mathematics ?"
An Apology for Idlers 113
" No, to be sure."
" Is it metaphysics ?"
" Nor that."
" Is it some language ?"
*' Nay, it is no language/'
"Is it a trade?"
" Nor a trade neither."
" Why, then, what is't ?"
" Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for
me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to
note what is commonly done by persons in
my case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs
and Thickets on the Road ; as also, what
manner of Staff is of the best service.
Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn
by root-of-heart a lesson which my master
teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment."
Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was
much commoved with passion, and shaking
his cane with a very threatful countenance,
broke forth upon this wise : " Learning,
quotha!" said he; "I would have all such
rogues scourged by the Hangman !"
And so he would go his way, ruffling out
114 ^^ Apology for Idlers
his cravat with a crackle of starch, like a
turkey when it spread its feathers.
Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common
opinion. A fact is not called a fact, but a
piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one
of your scholastic categories. An inquiry
must be in some acknowledged direction,
with a name to go by ; or else you are not
inquiring at all, only lounging ; and the work-
house is too good for you. It is supposed
that all knowledge is at the bottom of a
well, or the far end of a telescope. Sainte-
Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all
experience as a single great book, in which
o study for a few years ere we go hence ;
and it seemed all one to him whether you
should read in Chapter xx., which is the
differential calculus, or in Chapter xxxix.,
which is hearing the band play in the
gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent
person, looking out of his eyes and hearken-
ing in his ears, with a smile on his face all
the time, will get more true education than
many another in a life of heroic vigils.
An Apology for Idlers 1 1 5
There is certainly some chill and arid know-
ledge to be found upon the summits of
formal and laborious science ; but it is all
round about you, and for the trouble of
looking, that you will acquire the warm and
palpitating facts of life. While others are
filling their memory with a lumber of words,
one-half of which they will forget before the
week be out, your truant may learn some
really useful art : to play the fiddle, to know
a good cigar, or to speak with ease and
opportunity to all varieties of men. Many
who have '* plied their book diligently," and
know all about some one branch or another
of accepted lore, come out of the study with
an ancient and owl -like demeanour, and
prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all
the better and brighter parts of life. Many
make a large fortune, who remain under-
bred and pathetically stupid to the last.
And meantime there goes the idler, who
began life along with them — by your leave,
a different picture. He has had time to
take care of his health and his spirits ; he
ii6 An Apology for Idlers
has been a great deal in the open air, which
is the most salutary of all things for both
body and mind ; and if he has never read
the great Book in very recondite places, he
has dipped into it and skimmed it over to
excellent purpose. Might not the student
afford some Hebrew roots, and the business
man some of his half-crowns, for a share of
the idler's knowledge of life at large, and
Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has
another and more important quality than
these. I mean his wisdom. He who has
much looked on at the childish satisfaction
of other people in their hobbies, will regard
his own with only a very ironical indulgence.
He will not be heard among the dogmatists.
He will have a great and cool allowance
for all sorts of people and opinions. If he
finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify
himself with no very burning falsehood. His
way takes him along a by-road, not much
frequented, but very even and pleasant,
which is called Commonplace Lane, and
leads to the Belvedere of Commonsense.
An Apology for Idlers 1 1 7
Thence he shall command an agreeable, if
no very noble prospect ; and while others
behold the East and West, the Devil and
the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of
a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary
things, with an army of shadows running
speedily and in many different directions
into the great daylight of Eternity. The
shadows and the generations, the shrill
doctors and the plangent wars,, go by into
ultimate silence and emptiness ; but under-
neath all this, a man may see, out of the
Belvedere windows, much green and peace-
ful landscape ; many firelit parlours ; good
people laughing, drinking, and making love
as they did before the Flood or the French
Revolution ; and the old shepherd telling
his tale under the hawthorn.
Extreme busyness^ whether at school or
college, kirk or market, is a symptom of
deficient vitality ; and a faculty for idleness
implies a catholic appetite and a strong
sense of personal identity. There is a sort
of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who
1 1 8 An Apology for Idlers
are scarcely conscious of living except in
the exercise of some conventional occupation.
Bring these fellows into the country, or set
them aboard ship, and you will see how
they pine for their desk or their study.
They have no curiosity ; they cannot give
themselves over to random provocations ;
they do not take pleasure in the exercise
of their faculties for its own sake ; and
unless Necessity lays about them with a
stick, they will even stand still. It is no
good speaking to such folk : they cannot
be idle, their nature is not generous enough ;
and they pass those hours in a sort of coma,
which are not dedicated to furious moiling
in the gold-mill. When they do not require
to go to the office, when they are not
hungry and have no mind to drink, the
whole breathing world is a blank to them.
If they have to wait an hour or so for a
train, they fall into a stupid trance with
their eyes open. To see them, you would
suppose there was nothing to look at and
no one to speak with ; you would imagine
An Apology for Idlers 119
they were paralysed or alienated ; and yet
very possibly they are hard workers in their
own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw
in" a deed or a turn of the market. They
have been to school and college, but all the
time they had their eye on the medal ; they
have gone about in the world and mixed
with clever people, but all the time they
were thinking of their own affairs. As if
a man's soul were not too small to begin
with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs
by a life of all work and no play ; until
here they are at forty, with a listless atten-
tion, a mind vacant of all material of
amusement, and not one thought to rub
against another, while they wait for the
train. Before he was breeched, he might
have clambered on the boxes ; when he was
twenty, he would have stared at the girls ;
but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-
box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt
upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes.
This does not appeal to me as being Success
in Life.
120 All Apology for Idlers
But it is not only the person himself who
suffers from his busy habits, but his wife and
children, his friends and relations, and down
to the very people he sits with in a railway
carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion
to what a man calls his business, is only to
be sustained by perpetual neglect of many
other things. And it is not by any means
certain that a man's business is the most
important thing he has to do. To an
impartial estimate it will seem clear that
many of the wisest, most virtuous, and most
beneficent parts that are to be played upon
the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous
performers, and pass, among the world at
large, as phases of idleness. For in that
Theatre, not only the walking gentlemen,
singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers
in the orchestra, but those who look on and
clap their hands from the benches, do really
play a part and fulfil important offices
towards the general result. You are no
doubt very dependent on the care of your
lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and
An Apology for Idlers 1 2 1
signalmen who convey you rapidly from
place to place, and the policemen who walk
the streets for your protection ; but is there
not a thought of gratitude in your heart for
certain other benefactors who set you smiling
when they fall in your way, or season your
dinner with good company ? Colonel New-
come helped to lose his friend's money ;
Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing
shirts ; and yet they were better people to
fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though
Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I
think I could name one or two long-faced
Barabbases whom the world could better
have done without. Hazlitt mentions that
he was more sensible of obligation to North-
cote, who had never done him anything he
could call a service, than to his whole circle
of ostentatious friends ; for he thought a
good companion emphatically the greatest
benefactor. I know there are people in the
world who cannot feel grateful unless the
favour has been done them at the cost of
pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish
122 An Apology for Idlers
disposition. A man may send you six
sheets of letter-paper covered with the most
entertaining gossip, or you may pass half an
hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an
article of his ; do you think the service
would be greater, if he had made the manu-
script in his heart's blood, like a compact
with the devil ? Do you really fancy you
should be more beholden to your corres-
pondent, if he had been damning you all
the while for your importunity ? Pleasures
are more beneficial than duties because, like
the quality of mercy, they are not strained,
and they are twice blest. There must always
be two to a kiss, and there may be a score
in a jest ; but wherever there is an element
of sacrifice, the favour is conferred with pain,
and, among generous people, received with
confusion. There is no duty we so much
underrate as the duty of being happy. By
being happy, we sow anonymous benefits
Upon the world, which remain unknown even
to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, sur-
prise nobody so much as the benefactor.
A n Apology for Idlers 1 2 3
The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran
down the street after a marble, with so jolly
an air that he set every one he passed into a
good humour ; one of these persons, who
had been delivered from more than usually
black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and
gave him some money with this remark :
" You see what sometimes comes of looking
pleased." If he had looked pleased before,
he had now to look both pleased and mysti-
fied. For my part, I justify this encourage-
ment of smiling rather than tearful children ;
I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but
upon the stage ; but I am prepared to deal
largely in the opposite commodity. A happy
man or woman is a better thing to find than
a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating
focus of goodwill ; and their entrance into a
room is as though another candle had been
lighted. We need not care whether they
could prove the forty -seventh proposition ;
they do a better thing than that, they prac-
tically demonstrate the great Theorem of the
Liveableness of Life. Consequently, if a
124 An Apology for Idlers
person cannot be happy without remaining
idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolu-
tionary precept ; but thanks to hunger and
the workhouse, one not easily to be abused ;
and within practical limits, it is one of the
most incontestable truths in the whole Body
of Morality. Look at one of your industrious
fellows for a moment, I beseech you. He
sows hurry and reaps indigestion ; he puts
a vast deal of activity out to interest, and
receives a large measure of nervous derange-
ment in return. Either he absents himself
entirely from all fellowship, and lives a
recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and
a leaden inkpot ; or he comes among people
swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his
whole nervous system, to discharge some
temper before he returns to work. I do not
care how much or how well he' works, this
fellow is an evil feature in other people's
lives. They would be happier if he were
dead. They could easier do without his
services in the Circumlocution Office, than
they can tolerate his fractious spirits. He
' An Apology for Idlers 1 2 5
poisons life at the well-head. It is better to
be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace
nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish
uncle.
And what, in God's name, is all this
pother about ? For what cause do they
embitter their own and other people's lives ?
That a man should publish three or thirty
articles a year, that he should finish or not
finish his great allegorical picture, are ques-
tions of little interest to the world. The
ranks of life are full ; and although a thou-
sand fall, there are always some to go into
the breach. When they told Joan of Arc
she should be at home minding wom^en's
work, she answered there were plenty to spin
and wash. And so, even with your own rare
gifts ! When nature is " so careless of the
single life," why should we coddle ourselves
into the fancy that our own is of exceptional
importance ? Suppose Shakespeare had been
knocked on the head some dark night in Sir
Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would
have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher
126 An Apology for Idlers '
gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and
the student to his book ; and no one been
any the wiser of the loss. There are not
many works extant, if you look the alter-
native all over, which are worth the price of
a pound of tobacco to a man of limited
means. This is a sobering reflection for the
proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a
tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no
great cause for personal vainglory in the
phrase ; for although tobacco is an admirable
sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing
it are neither rare nor precious in themselves.
Alas and alas ! you may take it how you
will, but the services of no single individual
are indispensable. Atlas was just a gentle-
man with a protracted nightmare ! And yet
you s*ee merchants who go and labour them-
selves into a great fortune and thence into
the bankruptcy court ; scribblers who keep
scribbling at little articles until their temper
is a cross to all who come about them, as
though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to
make a pin instead of a pyramid ; and fine
An Apology for Idlers 127
young men who work themselves into a
decline, and are driven off in a hearse with
white plumes upon it. Would you not sup-
pose these persons had been whispered, by
the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of
some momentous destiny ? and that this
lukewarm bullet on which they play their
farces was the bull's-eye and centrepoint of
all the universe ? And yet it is not so. The
ends for which they give away their priceless
youth, for all they know, may be chimerical
or hurtful ; the glory and riches they expect
may never come, or may find them indif-
ferent ; and they and the world they inhabit
are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes
at the thought.
ORDERED SOUTH
"D Y a curious irony of fate, the places to
which we are sent when health deserts
us are often singularly beautiful. Often, too,
they are places we have visited in former
years, or seen briefly in passing by, and kept
ever afterwards in pious memory ; and we
please ourselves with the fancy that we shall
repeat many vivid and pleasurable sensations,
and take up again the thread of our enjoy-
ment in the same spirit as we let it fall. We
shall now have an opportunity of finishing
many pleasant excursions, interrupted of yore
before our curiosity was fully satisfied. It
may be that we have kept in mind, during
all these years, the recollection of some valley
into which we have just looked down for a
moment before we lost sight of it in the dis-
Ordered South 1 2 9
order of the hills ; it may be that we have
lain awake at night, and agreeably tantalised
ourselves with the thought of corners we had
never turned, or summits we had all but
climbed : we shall now be able, as we tell
ourselves, to complete all these unfinished
pleasures, and pass beyond the barriers that
confined our recollections.
The promise is so great, and we are all so
easily led away when hope and memory are
both in one story, that I daresay the sick
man is not very inconsolable when he receives
sentence of banishment, and is inclined to
regard his ill-health as not the least fortunate
accident of his life. Nor is he immediately
undeceived. The stir and speed of the
journey, and the restlessness that goes to
bed with him as he tries to sleep between
two days of noisy progress, fever him, and
stimulate his dull nerves into something of
their old quickness and sensibility. And so
he can enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of
the landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vine-
yard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory
K
130 Ordered Soidh
of fairy gold, which the first great winds of
winter will transmute, as in the fable, into
withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy
the admirable brevity and simplicity of such
little glimpses of country and country ways
as flash upon him through the windows of
the train ; little glimpses that have a char-
acter all their own ; sights seen as a travelling
swallow might see them from the wing, or
Iris as she went abroad over the land on
some Olympian errand. Here and there,
indeed, a few children huzzah and wave their
hands to the express ; but for the most part,
it is an interruption too brief and isolated to
attract much notice ; the sheep do not cease
from browsing ; a girl sits balanced on the
projecting tiller of a canal boat, so precari-
ously that it seems as if a fly or the splash
of a leaping fish would be enough to over-
throw the dainty equilibrium, and yet all
these hundreds of tons of coal and wood and
iron have been precipitated roaring past her
very ear, and there is not a start, not a tremor,
not a turn of the averted head, to indicate
Ordered South 1 3 1
that she has been even conscious of its
passage. Herein, I think, lies the chief
attraction of railway travel. The speed is
so easy, and the train disturbs so little the
scenes through which it takes us, that our
heart becomes full of the placidity and still-
ness of the country ; and while the body is
borne forward in the flying chain of carriages,
the thoughts alight, as the humour moves
them, at unfrequented stations ; they make
haste up the poplar alley that leads toward
the town ; they are left behind with the
signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand,
he watches the long train sweep away into
the golden distance.
Moreover, there is still before the invalid
the shock of wonder and delight with which
he will learn that he has passed the indefin-
able line that separates South from North.
And this is an uncertain moment ; for some-
times the consciousness is forced upon him
early, on the occasion of some slight associa-
tion, a colour, a flower, or a scent ; and
sometimes not until, one fine morning, he
1 3 2 Ordered SoiUh
wakes up with the southern sunshine peeping
through the persiennes^ and the southern
patois confusedly audible below the windows.
Whether it come early or late, however, this
pleasure will not end with the anticipation,
as do so many others of the same family.
It will leave him wider awake than it found
him, and give a new significance to all he
may see for many days to come. There is
something in the mere name of the South
that carries enthusiasm along with it. At
the sound of the word, he pricks up his ears ;
he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties
and to get by heart the permanent lines and
character of the landscape, as if he had been
told that it was all his own — an estate out
of which he had been kept unjustly, and
which he was now to receive in free and full
possession. Even those who have never
been there before feel as if they had been ;
and everybody goes comparing, and seeking
for the familiar, and finding it with such
ecstasies of recognition, that one would think
they were coming home after a weary ab-
Ordered South 133
sence, instead of travelling hourly farther
abroad.
It is only after he is fairly arrived and
settled down in his chosen corner, that the
invalid begins to understand the change that
has befallen him. Everything about him is
as he had remembered, or as he had antici-
pated. Here, at his feet, under his eyes, are
the olive gardens and the blue sea. Nothing
can change the eternal magnificence of form
of the naked Alps behind Mentone ; nothing,
not even the crude curves of the railway, can
utterly deform the suavity of contour of one
bay after another along the whole reach of the
Riviera. And of all this, he has only a cold
head knowledge that is divorced from enjoy-
ment. He recognises with his intelligence
that this thing and that thing is beautiful,
while in his heart of hearts he has to confess
that it is not beautiful for him. It is in vain
that he spurs his discouraged spirit ; in vain
that he chooses out points of view, and
stands there, looking with all his eyes, and
waiting for some return of the pleasure that
134 Ordered South
he remembers in other days, as the sick folk
may have awaited the coming of the angel at
the pool of Bethesda. He is like an enthu-
siast leading about with him a stolid, indiffer-
ent tourist. There is some one by who is
out of sympathy with the scene, and is not
moved up to the measure of the occasion ;
and that some one is himself The world is
disenchanted for him. He seems to himself
to touch things with muffled hands, and to
see them through a veil. His life becomes a
palsied fumbling after notes that are silent
when he has found and struck them. He
cannot recognise that this phlegmatic and
unimpressionable body with which he now
goes burthened, is the same that he knew
heretofore so quick and delicate and alive.
He is tempted to lay the blame on the
very softness and amenity of the climate, and
to fancy that in the rigours of the winter at
home, these dead emotions would revive and
flourish. A longing for the brightness and
silence of fallen snow seizes him at such times.
He is homesick for the hale rough weather ;
Ordered South 135
for the tracery of the frost upon his window-
panes at morning, the reluctant descent of
the first flakes, and the white roofs relieved
against the sombre sky. And yet the stuff
of which these yearnings are made, is of the
flimsiest : if but the thermometer fall a little
below its ordinary Mediterranean level, or a
wind come down from the snow-clad Alps
behind, the spirit of his fancies changes upon
the instant, and many a doleful vignette of
the grim wintry streets at home returns to
him, and begins to haunt his memory. The
hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in door-
ways ; the flinching gait of barefoot children
on the icy pavement ; the sheen of the rainy
streets towards afternoon ; the meagre anatomy
of the poor defined by the clinging of wet
garments ; the high canorous note of the
North-easter on days when the very houses
seem to stiffen with cold : these, and such as
these, crowd back upon him, and mockingly
substitute themselves for the fanciful winter
scenes with which he had pleased himself a
while before. He cannot be glad enough
1 36 Ordered South
that lie is where he is. If only the others
could be there also ; if only those tramps
could lie down for a little in the sunshine,
and those children warm their feet, this once,
upon a kindlier earth ; if only there were no
cold anywhere, and no nakedness, and no
hunger ; if only it were as well with all men
as it is with him !
For it is not altogether ill with the invalid,
after all. If it is only rarely that anything
penetrates vividly into his numbed spirit, yet,
when anything does, it brings with it a joy
that is all the more poignant for its very
rarity. There is something pathetic in these
occasional returns of a glad activity of heart.
In his lowest hours he will be stirred and
awakened by many such ; and they will
spring perhaps from very trivial sources ; as
a friend once said to me, the " spirit of de-
light " comes often on small wings. For the
pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is
essentially capricious. It comes sometimes
when we least look for it ; and sometimes,
when we expect it most certainly, it leaves
Ordered South 137
us to gape joylessly for days together, in the
very home-land of the beautiful. We may
have passed a place a thousand times and
one ; and on the thousand and second it will
be transfigured, and stand forth in a certain
splendour of reality from the dull circle of
surroundings ; so that we see it " with a
child's first pleasure," as Wordsworth saw
the daffodils by the lake side. And if this
falls out capriciously with the healthy, how
much more so with the invalid. Some day
he will find his first violet, and be lost in
pleasant wonder, by w^hat alchemy the cold
earth of the clods, and the vapid air and
rain, can be transmuted into colour so rich
and odour so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps
he may see a group of washerwomen relieved,
on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or
a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered
daylight of an olive-garden ; and something
significant or monumental in the grouping,
something in the harmony of faint colour
that is always characteristic of the dress of
these southern women, will come home to
138 . Ordered South
him unexpectedly, and awake in him that
satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that
we are the richer by one more beautiful
experience. Or it may be something even
slighter : as when the opulence of the sun-
shine, which somehow gets lost and fails to
produce its effect on the large scale, is
suddenly revealed to him by the chance
isolation — as he changes the position of his
sunshade — of a yard or two of roadway with
its stones and weeds. And then, there is no
end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards
themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate
and continually shifting : now you would
say it was green, now gray, now blue ; now
tree stands above tree, like " cloud on cloud,"
massed into filmy indistinctness ; and now,
at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is
shaken and broken up with little momentary
silverings and shadows. But every one sees
the world in his own way. To some the
glad moment may have arrived on other
provocations ; and their recollection may be
most vivid of the stately gait of women
Ordered South 1 3 9
carrying burthens on their, heads ; of tropical
effects, with canes and naked rock and sun-
light ; of the relief of cypresses ; of the
troubled, busy-looking groups of sea-pines,
that seem always as if they were being
wielded and swept together by a whirlwind ;
of the air coming, laden with virginal per-
fumes, over the myrtles and the scented
underwood ; of the empurpled hills standing
up, solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold
air of the east at evening.
There go many elements, without doubt,
to the making of one such moment of intense
perception ; and it is on the happy agreement
of these many elements, on the harmonious
vibration of many nerves, that the whole
delight of the moment must depend. Who
can forget how, when he has chanced upon
some attitude of complete restfulness, after
long uneasy rolling to and fro on grass or
heather, the whole fashion of the landscape
has been changed for him, as though the sun
had just broken forth, or a great artist had
only then completed, by some cunning touch.
1 40 Ordered South
the composition of the picture? And not
only a change of posture — a snatch of
perfume, the sudden singing of a bird, the
freshness of some pulse of air from an invisible
sea, the light shadow of a travelling cloud,
the merest nothing that sends a little shiver
along the most infinitesimal nerve of a man's
body — not one of the least of these but has
a hand somehow in the general effect, and
brings some refinement of its own into the
character of the pleasure we feel.
And if the external conditions are thus
varied and subtle, even more so are those
within our own bodies. No man can find
out the world, says Solomon, from beginning
to end, because the world is in his heart ;
and so it is impossible for any of us to
understand, from beginning to end, that
ag-reement of harmonious circumstances that
creates in us the highest pleasure of admira-
tion, precisely because some of these circum-
stances are hidden from us for ever in the
constitution of our own bodies. After we
have reckoned up all that we can see or hear
Ordered South 1 4 1
or feel, there still remains to be taken into
account some sensibility more delicate than
usual in the nerves affected, or some exquisite
refinement in the architecture of the brain,
which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful
as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing
or sight. We admire splendid views and
great pictures ; and yet what is truly admir-
able is rather the mind within us, that
gathers together these scattered details for
its delight, and makes out of certain colours,
certain distributions of graduated light and
darkness, that intelligible whole which alone
we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relating
in one of his essays how he went on foot
from one great man's house to another's in
search of works of art, begins suddenly to
triumph over these noble and wealthy owners,
because he was more capable of enjoying
their costly possessions than they were ;
because they had paid the money and he had
received the pleasure. And the occasion is
a fair one for self-complacency. While the
one man was working to be able to buy the
142 Ordered South
picture, the other was working to be able to
enjoy the picture. An inherited aptitude
will have been diligently improved in either
case ; only the one man has made for himself
a fortune, and the other has made for himself
a living spirit. It is a fair occasion for self-
complacency, I repeat, when the event shows
a man to have chosen the better part, and
laid out his life more wisely, in the long run,
than those who have credit for most wisdom.
And yet even this is not a good unmixed ;
and like all other possessions, although in a
less degree, the possession of a brain that
has been thus improved and cultivated, and
made into the prime organ of a man's enjoy-
ment, brings with it certain inevitable cares
and disappointments. The happiness of such
an one comes to depend greatly upon those
fine shades of sensation that heighten and
harmonise the coarser elements of beauty.
And thus a degree of nervous prostration,
that to other men would be hardly disagreeable,
is enough to overthrow for him the whole
fabric of his life, to take, except at rare
Ordered South 143
moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to
meet him wherever he goes with failure, and
the sense of want, and disenchantment of the
world and life.
It is not in such numbness of spirit only
that the life of the invalid resembles a pre-
mature old age. Those excursions that he
had promised himself to finish, prove too
long or too arduous for his feeble body ;
and the barrier-hills are as impassable as
ever. Many a white town that sits far out
on the promontory, many a comely fold of
wood on the mountain side, beckons and
allures his imagination day after day, and is
yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts
and gorges of the clouds. The sense of
distance grows upon him wonderfully ; and
after some feverish efforts and the fretful
uneasiness of the first few days, he falls
contentedly in with the restrictions of his
weakness. His narrow round becomes plea-
sant and familiar to him as the cell to a
contented prisoner. Just as he has fallen
already out of the mid race of active life, he
1 44 Ordered South
now falls out of the little eddy that chxiilatcs
in the shallow waters of the sanatorium.
He sees the country people come and go
about their everyday affairs, the foreigners
stream out in goodly pleasure parties ; the
stir of man's activity is all about him, as he
suns himself inertly in some sheltered corner;
and he looks on with a patriarchal imperson-
ality of interest, such as a man may feel
when he pictures to himself the fortunes of
his remote descendants, or the robust old age
of the oak he has planted over-night.
In this falling aside, in this quietude and
desertion of other men, there is no inhar-
monious prelude to the last quietude and
desertion of the grave ; in this dulness of
the senses there is a gentle preparation for
the final insensibility of death. And to him
the idea of mortality comes in a shape less
violent and harsh than is its wont, less as
an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of
infinitesimal gradation, and the last step on
a long decline of way. As we turn to and
fro in bed, and every moment the movements
Ordered Sottth i45
grow feebler and smaller and the attitude
more restful and easy, until sleep overtakes
us at a stride and we move no more, so
desire after desire leaves him ; day by day
his strength decreases, and the circle of his
activity grows ever narrower ; and he feels,
if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the
passion of life, thus gradually inducted into
the slumber of death, that when at last the
end comes, it will come quietly and fitly.
If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the
coming of the last enemy, surely it should
be such a mild approach as this ; not to hale
us forth with violence, but to persuade us
from a place we have no further pleasure in.
It is not so much, indeed, death that
approaches as life that withdraws and withers
up from round about him. He has outlived
his own usefulness, and almost his own
enjoyment ; and if there is to be no recovery;
if never again will he be young and strong
and passionate, if the actual present shall be
to him always like a thing read in a book or
remembered out of the far-away past ; if, in
146 Ordered South
fact, this be veritably nightfall, he will not
wish greatly for the continuance of a twilight
that only strains and disappoints the eyes,
but steadfastly await the perfect darkness.
He will pray for Medea : when she comes,
let her either rejuvenate or slay.
And yet the ties that still attach him to
the world are many and kindly. The sight
of children has a significance for him such
as it may have for the aged also, but not for
others. If he has been used to feel humanely,
and to look upon life somewhat more widely
than from the narrow loophole of personal
pleasure and advancement, it is strange how
small a portion of his thoughts will be changed
or embittered by this proximity of death.
He knows that already, in English counties,
the sower follows the ploughman up the face
of the field, and the rooks follow the sower ;
and he knows also that he may not live to
go home again and see the corn spring and
ripen, and be cut down at last, and brought
home with gladness. And yet the future of
this harvest, the continuance of drought or
Ordered South 1 4 7
the coming of rain unseasonably, touch him
as sensibly as ever. For he has long been
used to wait with interest the issue of events
in which his own concern was nothing ; and
to be joyful in a plenty, and sorrowful for a
famine, that did not increase or diminish, by
one half loaf, the equable sufficiency of his
own supply. Thus there remain unaltered
all the disinterested hopes for mankind and
a better future which have been the solace
and inspiration of his life. These he has set
beyond the reach of any fate that only
menaces himself; and it makes small differ-
ence whether he die five thousand years, or
five thousand and fifty years, before the good
epoch for which he faithfully labours. He
has not deceived himself; he has known
from the beginning that he followed the
pillar of fire and cloud, only to perish himself
in the wilderness, and that it was reserved
for others to enter joyfully Into possession of
the- land. And so, as everything grows
grayer and quieter about him, and slopes
towards extinction, these unfaded visions
148 Ordered South
accompany his sad decline, and follow him,
with friendly voices and hopeful words, into
the very vestibule of death. The desire of
love or of fame scarcely moved him, in his
days of health, more strongly than these
generous aspirations move him now ; and so
life is earned forward beyond life, and a vista
kept open for the eyes of hope, even when
his hands grope already on the face of the
impassable.
Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the
thought of his friends ; or shall we not say
rather, that by their thought for him, by their
unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains
woven into the very stuff of life, beyond the
power of bodily dissolution to undo ? In a
thousand ways will he survive and be per-
petuated. Much of Etienne de la Boetie
survived during all the years in which
Montaigne continued to converse with him
on the pages of the ever-delightful essays.
Much of what was truly Goethe was dead
already when he revisited places that knew
him no more, and found no better consolation
Ordered South 1 49
than the promise of his own verses, that soon
he too would be at rest. Indeed, when we
think of what it is that we most seek and
cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in
calling ours, it will sometimes seem to us as
if our friends, at our decease, would suffer
loss more truly than ourselves. As a monarch
who should care more for the outlying
colonies he knows on the map or through
the report of his vicegerents, than for the
trunk of his empire under his eyes at home,
are we not more concerned about the shadowy
life that we have in the hearts of others, and
that portion in their thoughts and fancies
which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs
to us, than about the real knot of our identity
— that central metropolis of self, of which
alone we are immediately aware — or the
diligent service of arteries and veins and
infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we
know (as we know a proposition in Euclid)
to be the source and substance of the whole?
At the death of every one whom we love,
some fair and honourable portion of our
1 5 o Ordered South
existence falls away, and we are dislodged
from one of these dear provinces ; and they
are not, perhaps, the most fortunate who
survive a long series of such impoverishments,
till their life and influence narrow gradually
into the meagre limit of their own spirits,
and death, when he comes at last, can destroy
them at one blow.
Note. — To this essay I must in honesty append a
word or two of qualification ; for this is one of the
points on which a slightly greater age teaches us a
slightly different wisdom :
A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose
from particular obligations ; he jogs on the footpath
way, himself pursuing butterflies, but courteously
lending his applause to the advance of the human
species and the coming of the kingdom of justice and
love. As he grows older, he begins to think more
narrowly of man's actipn in the general, and perhaps
more arrogantly of his own in the particular. He
has not that same unspeakable trust in what he
would have done had he been spared, seeing finally
that that would have been little ; but he has a far
higher notion of the blank that he will make by
dying. A young man feels himself one too many in
the world ; his is a painful situation : he has no
calling ; no obvious utility ; no ties, but to his parents,
and these he is sure to disregard. I do not think
Ordered South 1 5 1
that a proper allowance has been made for this true
cause of suffering in youth ; but by the mere fact of
a prolonged existence, we outgrow either the fact or
else the feeling. Either we become so callously
accustomed to our own useless figure in the world, or
else — and this, thank God, in the majority of cases — •
we so collect about us the interest or the love of our
fellows, so multiply our effective part in the affairs of
life, that we need to entertain no longer the question
of our right to be.
And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies
himself dying, will get cold comfort from the very
youthful view expressed in this essay. He, as a living
man, has some to help, some to love, some to correct ;
it may be, some to punish. These duties cling, not
upon humanity, but upon the man himself. It is he,
not another, who is one woman's son and a second
woman's husband and a third woman's father. That
life which began so small, has now grown, with a
myriad filaments, into the lives of others. It is not in-
dispensable ; another will take the place and shoulder
the discharged responsibility ; but the better the man
and the nobler his purposes, the more will he be
tempted to regret the extinction of his powers and
the deletion of his personality. To have lived a
generation, is not only to have grown at home in that
perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable
duties. To die at such an age, has, for all but the
entirely base, something of the air of a betrayal. A
man does not only reflect upon what he might have
done in a future that is never to be his ; but beholding
himself so early a deserter from the fight, he eats his
152 Ordered SoiUh
heart for the good he might have done already. To
have been so useless and now to lose all hope of
being useful any more — there it is that death and
memory assail him. And even if mankind shall go
on, founding heroic cities, practising heroic virtues,
rising steadily from strength to strength ; even if his
work shall be fulfilled, his friends consoled, his wife
remarried by a better than he ; how shall this alter,
in one jot, his estimation of a career which was his
only business in this world, which was so fitfully
pursued, and which is now so inefifectively to end ?
^S TRIPLEX
'T^HE changes wrought by death are in
themselves so sharp and final, and so
terrible and melancholy in their consequences,
that the thing stands alone in man's experi-
ence, and has no parallel upon earth. It
outdoes all other accidents because it is the
last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly
upon its victims, like a Thug ; sometimes it
lays a regular siege and creeps upon their
citadel during a score of years. And when
the business is done, there is sore havoc
made in other people's lives, and a pin
knocked out by which many subsidiary
friendships hung together. There are empty
chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at
night. Again, in taking away our friends,
death does not take them away utterly, but
154 ^^ T^Hplex
leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon
intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly-
concealed. Hence a whole chapter of sights
and customs striking to the mind, from the
pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule
trees of mediaeval Europe. The poorest
persons have a bit of pageant going towards
the tomb ; memorial stones are set up over
the least memorable ; and, in order to pre-
serve some show of respect for what remains
of our old loves and friendships, we must
accompany it with much grimly ludicrous
ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades
before the door. All this, and much more
of the same sort, accompanied by the
eloquence of poets, has gone a great way
to put humanity in error ; nay, in many
philosophies the error has been embodied
and laid down with every circumstance of
logic ; although in real life the bustle and
swiftness, in leaving people little time to
think, have not left them time enough to
go dangerously wrong in practice.
As a matter of fact, although few things
^s Triplex 155
are spoken of with more fearful whisperings
than this prospect of death, few have less
influence on conduct under healthy circum-
stances. We have all heard of cities in
South America built upon the side of fiery
mountains, and how, even in this tremendous
neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot
more impressed by the solemnity of mortal
conditions than if they were delving gardens
in the greenest corner of England. There
are serenades and suppers and much gallantry
among the myrtles overhead ; and mean-
while the foundation shudders underfoot, the
bowels of the mountain growl, and at any
moment living ruin may leap sky-high into
the moonlight, and tumble man and his
merry-making in the dust. In the eyes of
very young people, and very dull old ones,
there is something indescribably reckless
and desperate in such a picture. It seems
not credible that respectable married people,
with umbrellas, should find appetite for a
bit of supper within quite a long distance of
a fiery mountain ; ordinary life begins to
156 ^s Triplex
smell of high-handed debauch when it is
carried on so close to a catastrophe ; and
even cheese and salad, it seems, could hardly
be relished in such circumstances without
something like a defiance of the Creator.
It should be a place for nobody but hermits
dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere
born -devils drowning care in a perpetual
carouse.
And yet, when one comes to think upon it
calmly, the situation of these South American
citizens forms only a very pale figure for
the state of ordinary mankind. This world
itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in over-
crowded space, among a million other worlds
travelling blindly and swiftly in contrary
directions, may very well come by a knock
that would set it into explosion like a penny
squib. And what, pathologically looked at,
is the human body with all its organs, but
a mere bagful of petards ? The least of
these is as dangerous to the whole economy
as the ship's powder-magazine to the ship ;
and with every breath we breathe, and every
^s Triplex 157
meal we eat, we are putting one or more of
them in peril. If we clung as devotedly
as some philosophers pretend we do to
the abstract idea of life, or were half as
frightened as they make out we are, for
the subversive accident that ends it all, the
trumpets might sound by the hour and no
one would follow them into battle — the
blue-peter might fly at the truck, but who
would climb into a sea-going ship ? Think
(if these philosophers were right) with what
a preparation of spirit we should affront the
daily peril of the dinner-table : a deadlier
spot than any battle-field in history, where
the far greater proportion of our ancestors
have miserably left their bones ! What
woman would ever be lured into marriage,
so much more dangerous than the wildest
sea ? And what would it be to grow old ?
For, after a certain distance, every step we
take in life we find the ice growing thinner
below our feet, and all around us and behind us
we see our contemporaries going through. By
the time a man gets well into the seventies,
158 ^s Triplex
his continued existence is a mere miracle ;
and when he lays his old bones in bed for
the night, there is an overwhelming prob-
ability that he will never see the day. Do
the old men mind it, as a matter of fact ?
Why, no. They were never merrier ; they
have their grog at night, and tell the raciest
stories ; they hear of the death of people
about their own age, or even younger, not
as if it was a grisly warning, but with a
simple childlike pleasure at having outlived
some one else ; and when a draught might
puff them out like a guttering candle, or a
bit of a stumble shatter them like so much
glass, their old hearts keep sound and un-
afifrighted, and they go on, bubbling with
laughter, through years of man's age com-
pared to which the valley at Balaklava was
as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green
on Sunday. It may fairly be questioned (if
we look to the peril only) whether it was a
much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge
into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of
ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed.
^s Triplex i59
Indeed, it is a memorable subject for con-
sideration, with what unconcern and gaiety
mankind pricks on along the Valley of the
Shadow of Death. The whole way is one
wilderness of snares, and the end of it, for
those who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable
ruin. And yet we go spinning through it
all, like a party for the Derby. Perhaps
the reader remembers one of the humorous
devices of the deified Caligula : how he
encouraged a vast concourse of holiday-
makers on to his bridge over Baiae bay ;
and when they were in the height of their
enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards
among the company, and had them tossed
into the sea. This is no bad miniature
of the dealings of nature with the transitory
race of man. Only, what a chequered picnic
we have of it, even while it lasts ! and into
what great waters, not to be crossed by any
swimmer, God's pale Praetorian throws us
over in the end !
We live the time that a match flickers ;
we pop the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and
i6o ^s Triplex
the earthquake swallows us on the instant.
Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not,
in the highest sense of human speech, in-
credible, that we should think so highly of
the ginger -beer, and regard so little the
devouring earthquake? The love of Life
and the fear of Death are two famous phrases
that grow harder to understand the more we
think about them. It is a well-known fact
that an immense proportion of boat accidents
would never happen if people held the sheet
in their hands instead of making it fast ;
and yet, unless it be some martinet of a
professional mariner or some landsman with
shattered nerves, every one of God's creatures
makes it fast. A strange instance of man's
unconcern and brazen boldness in the face
of death !
We confound ourselves with metaphysical
phrases, which we import into daily talk with
noble inappropriateness. We have no idea
of what death is, apart from its circumstances
and some of its consequences to others ; and
although we have some experience of living,
^s Triplex i6i
there is not a man on earth who has flown
so high into abstraction as to have any
practical guess at the meaning of the word
life. All literature, from Job and Omar
Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whit-
man, is but an attempt to look upon the
human state with such largeness of view as
shall enable us to rise from the consideration
of living to the Definition of Life. And our
sages give us about the best satisfaction in
their power when they say that it is a vapour,
or a show, or made out of the same stuff
with dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid
sense, has been at the same work for ages ;
and after a myriad bald heads have wagged
over the problem, and piles of words have
been heaped one upon another into dry and
cloudy volumes without end, philosophy has
the honour of laying before us, with modest
pride, her contribution towards the subject :
that life is a Permanent Possibility of Sensa-
tion. Truly a fine result ! A man may
very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman ;
but surely, surely, not a Permanent Possibility
M
1 62 ^s Triplex
of Sensation ! He may be afraid of a preci-
pice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a
club, or even an undertaker's man ; but not
certainly of abstract death. We may trick
with the word life in its dozen senses until
we are weary of tricking ; we may argue in
terms of all the philosophies on earth, but
one fact remains true throughout — -that we
do not love life, in the sense that we are
greatly preoccupied about its conservation ;
that we do not, properly speaking, love life
at all, but living. Into the views of the
least careful there will enter some degree of
providence ; no man's eyes are fixed entirely
on the passing hour ; but although we have
some anticipation of good health, good
weather, wine, active employment, love, and
self-approval, the sum of these anticipations
does not amount to anything like a general
view of life's possibilities and issues ; nor are
those who cherish them most vividly, at all
the most scrupulous of their personal safety.
To be deeply interested in the accidents of
our existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed
^s Triplex 163
texture of human experience, rather leads a
man to disregard precautions, and risk his
neck against a straw. For surely the love
of living is stronger in an Alpine climber
roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily
at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives
upon a diet and walks a measured distance
in the interest of his constitution.
There is a great deal of very vile nonsense
talked upon both sides of the matter : tearing
divines reducing life to the dimensions of a
mere funeral procession, so sliort as to be
hardly decent ; and melancholy unbelievers
yearning for the tomb as if it were a world
too far away. Both sides must feel a little
ashamed of their performances now and
again when they draw in their chairs to
dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle
of wine is an answer to most standard works
upon the question. When a man's heart
warms to his viands, he forgets a great deal
of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of
contemplation. Death may be knocking at
the door, like the Commander's statue ; we
104 y^s Triplex
have something else in hand, thank God, and
let him knock. Passing bells are ringing all
the world over. All the world over, and
every hour, some one is parting company
with all his aches and ecstasies. For us
also the trap is laid. But we are so fond of
life that we have no leisure to entertain the
terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us
all through, and none of the longest. Small
blame to us if we give our whole hearts to
this glowing bride of ours, to the appetites,
to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the
mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature,
and the pride of our own nimble bodies.
We all of us appreciate the sensations ;
but as for caring about the Permanence of
the Possibility, a man's head is generally
very bald, and his senses very dull, before he
comes to that. Whether we regard life as a
lane leading to a dead wall — a mere bag's
end, as the French say — or whether we
think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium,
where we wait our turn and prepare our
faculties for some more noble destiny ;
^s Triplex 165
whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in
little atheistic poetry-books, about its vanity
and brevity ; whether we look justly for
years of health and vigour, or are about to
mount into a bath-chair, as a step towards
the hearse ; in each and all of these views
and situations there is but one conclusion
possible : that a man should stop his ears
against paralysing terror, and run the race
that is set before him with a single mind.
No one surely could have recoiled with more
heartache and terror from the thought of
death than our respected lexicographer ; and
yet we know how little it affected his con-
duct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and
in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of
life. Already an old man, he ventured on
his Highland tour ; and his heart, bound
with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-
seven individual cups of tea. As courage
and intelligence are the two qualities best
worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the
first part of intelligence to recognise our
precarious estate in life, and the first part of
1 66 .<^s T7nplex
courage to be not at all abashed before the
fact. A frank and somewhat headlong car-
riage, not looking too anxiously before, not
dallying in maudlin regret over the past,
stamps the man who is well armoured for
this world.
And not only well armoured for himself,
but a good friend and a good citizen to boot.
We do not go to cowards for tender dealing ;
there is nothing so cruel as panic ; the man
who has least fear for his own carcase, has
most time to consider others. That eminent
chemist who took his walks abroad in tin
shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk,
had all his work cut out for him in con-
siderate dealings with his own digestion.
So soon as prudence has begun to grow up
in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its
first expression in a paralysis of generous
acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually ;
he develops a fancy for parlours with a regu-
lated temperature, and takes his morality on
the principle of tin shoes and tepid milk.
The care of one important body or soul
/^s Triplex 167
becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of
the outer world begin to come thin and faint
into the parlour with the regulated tempera-
ture ; and the tin shoes go equably forward
over blood and rain. To be overwise is to
ossify ; and the scruple-monger ends by stand-
ing stockstill. Now the man who has his
heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling
weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life
as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully
hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance
of the world, keeps all his pulses going true
and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs,
until, if he be running towards anything
better than wildfire, he may shoot up and
become a constellation in the end. Lord
look after his health, Lord have a care of his
soul, says he ; and he has at the key of the
position, and swashes through incongruity
and peril towards his aim. Death is on all
sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is
on all sides of all of us ; unfortunate sur-
prises gird him round ; mim-mouthed friends
and relations hold up their hands in quite a
1 68 ^s Triplex
little elegiacal synod about his path : and
what cares he for all this ? Being a true
lover of living, a fellow with something
pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he
must, like any other soldier, in any other
stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best
pace until he touch the goal. " A peerage
or Westminster Abbey!" cried Nelson in
his bright, boyish, heroic manner. These
are great incentives ; not for any of these,
but for the plain satisfaction of living, of
being about their business in some sort or
other, do the brave, serviceable men of every
nation tread down the nettle danger, and
pass flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks of
prudence. Think of the heroism of Johnson,
think of that superb indifference to mortal
limitation that set him upon his dictionary,
and carried him through triumphantly until
the end ! Who, if he were wisely considerate
of things at large, would ever embark upon
any work much more considerable than a
halfpenny post card ? Who would project a
serial novel, after Thackeray and Dickens
j^s Triplex 169
had each fallen in mid-course ? Who would
find heart enough to begin to live, if he
dallied with, the consideration of death ?
And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quib-
bling all this is ! To forego all the issues of
living in a parlour with a regulated tempera-
ture— as if* that were not to die a hundred
times over, and for ten years at a stretch !
As if it were not to die in one's own lifetime,
and without even the sad immunities of death!
As if it were not to die, and yet be the
patient spectators of our own pitiable change!
The Permanent Possibility is preserved, but
the sensations carefully held at arm's length,
as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark
chamber. It is better to lose health like a
spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It
is better to live and be done with it, than to
die daily in the sickroom. By all means
begin your folio ; even if the doctor does not
give you a year, even if he hesitates about a
month, make one brave push and see what
can be accomplished in a week. It is not
only in finished undertakings that we ought
I/O ^s Triplex
to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out
of the man who means execution, which out-
lives the most untimely ending. All who
have meant good work with their whole
hearts, have done good work, although they
may die before they have the time to sign it.
Every heart that has beat strong and cheer-
fully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in
the world, and bettered the tradition of man-
kind. And even if death catch people, like
an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out
vast projects, and planning monstrous found-
ations, flushed with hope, and their mouths
full of boastful language, they should be at
once tripped up and silenced : is there not
something brave and spirited in such a ter-
mination ? and does not life go down with a
better grace, foaming in full body over a
precipice, than miserably straggling to an
end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks
made their fine saying that those whom the
gods love die young, I cannot help believing
they had this sort of death also in their eye.
For surely, at whatever age it overtake the
^■s Triplex 171
man, this is to die young. Death has not
been suffered to take so much as an illusion
from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tip-
toe on the highest point of being, he passes
at a bound on to the other side. The noise
of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched,
the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when,
trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-
starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the
spiritual land.
EL DORADO
TT seems as if a great deal were attainable
in a world where there are so many-
marriages and decisive battles, and where we
all, at certain hours of the day, and with
great gusto and despatch, stow a portion of
victuals finally and irretrievably into the bag
which contains us. And it would seem also,
on a hasty view, that the attainment of as
much as possible was the one goal of man's
contentious life. And yet, as regards the
spirit, this is but a semblance. We live in
an ascending scale when we live happily,
one thing leading to another in an endless
series. There is always a new horizon for
onward-looking men, and although we dwell
on a small planet, immersed in petty business
and not enduring beyond a brief period of
El Dorado I73
years, we are so constituted that our hopes
are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of
hoping is prolonged until the term of life.
To be truly happy is a question of how we
begin and not of how we end, of what we
want and not of what we have. An aspira-
tion is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as
a landed estate, a fortune which we can never
exhaust and which gives us year by year a
revenue of pleasurable activity. To have
many of these is to be spiritually rich. Life
is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre
unless we have some interests in the piece ;
and to those who have neither art nor science,
the world is a mere arrangement of colours,
or a rough footway where they may very
well break their shins. It is in virtue of
his own desires and curiosities that any man
continues to exist with even patience, that
he is charmed by the look of things and
people, and that he wakens every morning
with a renewed appetite for work and plea-
sure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes
through which he sees the world in the most
1 74 El Do7^ado
enchanted colours : it is they that make
women beautiful or fossils interesting : and
the man may squander his estate and come
to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets
he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure.
Suppose he could take one meal so compact
and comprehensive that he should never
hunger any more ; suppose him, at a glance,
to take in all the features of the world and
allay the desire for knowledge ; suppose him
to do the like in any province of experience
— would not that man be in a poor way for
amusement ever after?
One who goes touring on foot with a
single volume in his knapsack reads with
circumspection, pausing often to reflect, and
often laying the book down to contemplate
the landscape or the prints in the inn parlour;
for he fears to come to an end of his enter-
tainment, and be left companionless on the
last stages of his journey. A young fellow
recently finished the works of Thomas Carlyle,
winding up, if we remember aright, with the
ten note-books upon Frederick the Great.
El Dorado I75
**What!" cried the young fellow, in conster-
nation, "is there no more Carlyle? Am I
left to the daily papers ?" A more celebrated
instance is that of Alexander, who wept
bitterly because he had no more worlds to
subdue. And when Gibbon had finished the
Decline and Fall, he had only a few moments
of joy ; and it was with a " sober melancholy"
that he parted from his labours.
Happily we all shoot at the moon with
ineffectual arrows ; our hopes are set on
inaccessible El Dorado ; we come to an end
of nothing here below. Interests are only
plucked up to sow themselves again, like
mustard. You would think, when the child
was born, there would be an end to trouble ;
and yet it is only the beginning of fresh
anxieties; and when you have seen it through
its teething and its education, and at last its
marriage, alas ! it is only to have new fears,
new quivering sensibilities, with every day ;
and the health of your children's children
grows as touching a concern as that of your
own. Again, when you have married your
1/6 EL Dorado
wife, you would think you were got upon a
hilltop, and might begin to go downward by
an easy slope. But you have only ended
courting to begin marriage. Falling in love
and winning love are often difficult tasks to
overbearing and rebellious spirits ; but to
keep in love is also a business of some im-
portance, to which both man and wife must
bring kindness and goodwill. The true
love story commences at the altar, when
there lies before the married pair a most
beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity,
and a life-long struggle towards an unattain-
able ideal. Unattainable ? Ay, surely un-
attainable, from the very fact that they are
two instead of one.
" Of making books there is no end," com-
plained the Preacher ; and did not perceive
how highly he was praising letters as an
occupation. There is no end, indeed, to
making books or experiments, or to travel,
or to gathering wealth. Problem gives rise
to problem. We may study for ever, and
we are never as learned as we would. We
El Dorado 177
have never made a statue worthy of our
dreams. And when we have discovered a
continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it
is only to find another ocean or another
plain upon the further side. In the infinite
universe there is room for our swiftest dili-
gence and to spare. It is not like the works
of Carlyle, which can be read to an end.
Even in a corner of it, in a private park, or
in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet,
the weather and the seasons keep so deftly
changing that although we walk there for a
lifetime there will be always something new
to startle and delight us.
There is only one wish realisable on the
earth ; only one thing that can be perfectly
attained : Death. And from a variety of
circumstances we have no one to tell us
whether it be worth attainingr.
A strange picture we make on our way to
our chimaeras, ceaselessly marching, grudging
ourselves the time for rest ; indefatigable,
adventurous pioneers. It is true that we
shall never reach the goal ; it is even more
N
178 El Dorado
than probable that there is no such pla:e;
and if we lived for centuries and were en-
dowed with the powers of a god, we should
find ourselves not much nearer what we
wanted at the end. O toiling hands of
mortals ! O unwearied feet, travelling ye
know not whither ! Soon, soon, it seems to
you, you must come forth on some conspicu-
ous hilltop, and but a little way further,
against the setting sun, descry the spires of
El Dorado. Little do ye know your own
blessedness ; for to travel hopefully is a better
thing than to arrive, and the true success is
to labour.
THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS
" Whether it be wise in men to do such actions or no, I
am sure it is so in States to honour them." — Sir William
Temple.
'T^HERE is one story of the wars of Rome
which I have always very much envied
for England. Germanicus was going down
at the head of the legions into a dangerous
river — on the opposite bank the woods were
full of Germans — when there flew out seven
great eagles which seemed to marshal the
Romans on their way ; they did not pause
or waver, but disappeared into the forest
where the enemy lay concealed. " Forward !"
cried Germanicus, with a fine rhetorical
inspiration, " Forward ! and follow the Roman
birds." It would be a very heavy spirit that
did not give a leap at such a signal, and a
1 8o The Encrlish Ad7nirals
c>
very timorous one that continued to have
any doubt of success. To appropriate the
eagles as fellow-countrymen was to make
imaginary allies of the forces of nature ; the
Roman Empire and its military fortunes, and
along with these the prospects of those
individual Roman legionaries now fording a
river in Germany, looked altogether greater
and more hopeful. It is a kind of illusion
easy to produce. A particular shape of
cloud, the appearance of a particular star,
the holiday of some particular saint, anything
in short to remind the combatants of patriotic
legends or old successes, may be enough to
change the issue of a pitched battle ; for it
gives to the one party a feeling that Right
and the larger interests are with them.
If an Englishman wishes to have such a
feeling, it must be about the sea. The lion
is nothing to us ; he has not been taken to
the hearts of the people, and naturalised as
an English emblem. We know right well
that a lion would fall foul of us as grimly as
he would of a Frenchman or a Moldavian
The Eiifrlish Admirals 1 8 1
Jew, and we do not carry him before us in
the smoke of battle. But the sea is our
approach and bulwark ; it has been the scene
of our greatest triumphs and dangers ; and
we are accustomed in lyrical strains to claim
it as our own. The prostrating experiences
of foreigners between Calais and Dover have
always an agreeable side to English prepos-
sessions. A man from Bedfordshire, who
does not know one end of the ship from the
other until she begins to move, swaggers
among such persons with a sense of hereditary
nautical experience. To suppose yourself
endowed with natural parts for the sea
because you are the countryman of Blake
and mighty Nelson, is perhaps just as un-
warrantable as to imagine Scotch extraction
a sufficient guarantee that you will look well
in a kilt. But the feehng is there, and seated
beyond the reach of argument. We should
consider ourselves unworthy of our descent if
we did not share the arrogance of our pro-
genitors, and please ourselves with the pre-
tension that the sea is English. Even where
1 82 The Enzlish Admirals
it is looked upon by the guns and battlements
of another nation we regard it as a kind of
English cemetery, where the bones of our
seafaring fathers take their rest until the last
trumpet ; for I suppose no other nation has
lost as many ships, or sent as many brave
fellows to the bottom.
There is nowhere such a background for
heroism as the noble, terrifying, and pictur-
esque conditions of some of our sea fights.
Hawke's battle in the tempest, and Aboukir
at the moment when the French Admiral
blew up, reach the limit of what is imposing
to the imagination. And our naval annals
owe some of their interest to the fantastic
and beautiful appearance of old warships
and the romance that invests the sea and
everything sea-going in the eyes of English
lads on a half-holiday at the coast. Nay,
and what we know of the misery between
decks enhances the bravery of what was done
by giving it something for contrast. We
like to know that these bold and honest
fellows contrived to live, and to keep bold
The English Admirals 183
and honest, among absurd and vile surround-
ings. No reader can forget the description
of the Thunder in Roderick Random: the
disorderly tyranny ; the cruelty and dirt of
officers and men ; deck after deck, each with
some new object of offence ; the hospital,
where the hammocks were huddled together
with but fourteen inches space for each ; the
cockpit, far under water, where, "in an in-
tolerable stench," the spectacled steward kept
the accounts of the different messes ; and
the canvas enclosure, six feet square, in which
Morgan made flip and salmagundi, smoked
his pipe, sang his Welsh songs, and swore
his queer Welsh imprecations. There are
portions of this business on board the Thunder
over which the reader passes lightly and
hurriedly, like a traveller in a malarious
country. It is easy enough to understand
the opinion of Dr. Johnson : " Why,, sir," he
said, "no man will be a sailor who has
contrivance enough to get himself into a jail."
You would fancy any one's spirit would die
out under such an accumulation of darkness,
1 84 The English Admirals
noisomeness, and injustice, above all when he
had not come there of his own free will, but
under the cutlasses and bludgeons of the
press-gang. But perhaps a watch on deck
in the sharp sea air put a man on his mettle
again ; a battle must have been a capital
relief ; and prize-money, bloodily earned and
grossly squandered, opened the doors of the
prison for a twinkling. Somehow or other,
at least, this worst of possible lives could not
overlie the spirit and gaiety of our sailors ;
they did their duty as though they had some
interest in the fortune of that country which
so cruelly oppressed them, they served their
guns merrily when it came to fighting, and
they had the readiest ear for a bold, honour-
able sentiment, of any class of men the world
ever produced.
Most men of high destinies have high-
sounding names. Pym and Habakkuk may
do pretty well, but they must not think to
cope with the Cromwells and Isaiahs. And
you could not find a better case in point
than that of the English Admirals. Drake
The English Admirals 185
and Rooke and Hawke are picked names
for men of execution. Frobisher, Rodney,
Boscawen, Foul-Weather, Jack Byron, are all
good to catch the eye in a page of a naval
history. Cloudesley Shovel is a mouthful of
quaint and sounding syllables. Benbow has
a bulldog quality that suits the man's char-
acter, and it takes us back to those English
archers who were his true comrades for
plainness, tenacity, and pluck. Raleigh is
spirited and martial, and signifies an act of
bold conduct in the field. It is impossible
to judge of Blake or Nelson, no names
current among men being worthy of such
heroes. But still it is odd enough, and very
appropriate in this connection, that the latter
was greatly taken with his Sicilian title.
" The signification, perhaps, pleased him," says
Southey ; " Duke of Thunder was what in
Dahomey would have been called a strong
name ; it was to a sailor's taste, and certainly
to no man could it be more applicable."
Admiral in itself is one of the most satis-
factory of distinctions ; it has a noble sound
1 86 The English Admirals
and a very proud history ; and Columbus
thought so highly of it, that he enjoined his
heirs to sign themselves by that title as long
as the house should last.
But it is the spirit of the men, and not
their names, that I wish to speak about in
this paper. That spirit is truly English ;
they, and not Tennyson's cotton-spinners or
Mr. D'Arcy Thompson's Abstract Bagman,
are the true and typical Englishmen. There
may be more head of bagmen in the country,
but human beings are reckoned by number
only in political constitutions. And the
Admirals are typical in the full force of the
word. They are splendid examples of virtue,
indeed, but of a virtue in which most English-
men can claim a moderate share ; and what
we admire in their lives is a sort of apotheosis
of ourselves. Almost everybody in our land,
except humanitarians and a few persons
whose youth has been depressed by excep-
tionally aesthetic surroundings, can understand
and sympathise with an Admiral or a prize-
fighter. I do not wish to bracket Benbow
The English Admirals 187
and Tom Cribb ; but, depend upon it, they
are practically bracketed for admiration in
the minds of many frequenters of ale-houses.
If you told them about Germanicus and the
eagles, or Regulus going back to Carthage,
they would very likely fall asleep ; but tell
them about Harry Pearce and Jem Belcher,
or about Nelson and the Nile, and they put
down their pipes to listen. I have by me a
copy of Boxiana^ on the fly-leaves of which
a youthful member of the fancy kept a
chronicle of remarkable events and an obitu-
ary of great men. Here we find piously
chronicled the demise of jockeys, watermen,
and pugilists — Johnny Moore, of the Liver-
pool Prize Ring ; Tom Spring, aged fifty-
six ; " Pierce Egan, senior, writer of Boxiana
and other sporting works " — and among all
these, the Duke of Wellington ! If Benbow
had lived in the time of this annalist, do you
suppose his name would not have been added
to the glorious roll ? In short, we do not
all feel warmly towards Wesley or Laud, we
cannot all take pleasure in Paradise Lost ;
1 88 The English Admirals
but there are certain common sentiments and
touches of nature by which the whole nation
is made to feel kinship. A little while ago
everybody, from Hazlitt' and John Wilson
down to the imbecile creature who scribbled
his register on the fly-leaves of Boxiana, felt
a more or less shamefaced satisfaction in the
exploits of prize-fighters. And the exploits
of the Admirals are popular to the same
degree, and tell in all ranks of society. Their
sayings and doings stir English blood like
the sound of a trumpet ; and if the Indian
Empire, the trade of London, and all the
outward and visible ensigns of our greatness
should pass away, we should still leave
behind us a durable monument of what we
were in these sayings and doings of the
English Admirals.
Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own
flagship, the Venerable^ and only one other
vessel, heard that the whole Dutch fleet was
putting to sea. He told Captain Hotham
to anchor alongside of him in the narrowest
part of the channel, and fight his vessel till
The English Admirals 189
she sank. " I have taken the depth of the
water," added he, " and when the Venerable
goes down, my flag will still fly." And you
observe this is no naked Viking in a pre-
historic period ; but a Scotch member of
Parliament, with a smattering of the classics,
a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and
flannel underclothing. In the same spirit.
Nelson went into Aboukir with six colours
flying ; so that even if five were shot away,
it should not be imagined he had struck.
He too must needs wear his four stars outside
his Admiral's frock, to be a butt for sharp-
shooters. " In honour I gained them," he
said to objectors, adding with sublime illogi-
cality, " in honour I will die with them."
Captain Douglas of the Royal Oak, when
the Dutch fired his vessel in the Thames,
sent his men ashore, but was burned along
with her himself rather than desert his post
without orders. Just then, perhaps the
Merry Monarch was chasing a moth round
the supper-table with the ladies of his court.
When Raleigh sailed into Cadiz, and all the
1 90 The English Admii'als
forts and ships opened fire on him at once,
he scorned to shoot a gun, and made answer
with a flourish of insulting trumpets. I Hke
this bravado better than the wisest dispositions
to insure victory ; it comes from the heart
and goes to it. God has made nobler heroes,
but he never made a finer gentleman than
Walter Raleigh. And as our Admirals were
full of heroic superstitions, and had a strutting
and vainglorious style of fight, so they dis-
covered a startling eagerness for battle, and
courted war like a mistress. When the news
came to Essex before Cadiz that the attack
had been decided, he threw his hat into the
sea. It is in this way that a schoolboy hears
of a half-holiday ; but this was a bearded
man of great possessions who had just been
allowed to risk his life. Benbow could not
lie still in his bunk after he had lost his leg ;
he must be on deck in a basket to direct
and animate the fight. I said they loved
war like a mistress ; yet I think there are
not many mistresses we should continue to
woo under similar circumstances. Trowbridge
The English Admirals 191
went ashore with the Culloden, and was able
to take no part in the battle of the Nile.
" The merits of that ship and her gallant
captain," wrote Nelson to the Admiralty,
" are too well known to benefit by anything
I could say. Her misfortune was great in
getting aground, while her more fortunate
companions were in the full tide of happiness!'
This is a notable expression, and depicts the
whole great-hearted, big-spoken stock of the
English Admirals to a hair. It was to be
" in the full tide of happiness " for Nelson to
destroy five thousand five hundred and
twenty-five of his fellow-creatures, and have
his own scalp torn open by a piece of lang-
ridge shot. Hear him again at Copenhagen :
"A shot through the mainmast knocked the
splinters about ; and he observed to one of
his officers with a smile, ' It is warm work,
and this may be the last to any of us at any
moment;' and then, stopping short at the
gangway, added, with emotion, ' But^ mark
you — I would not be elsewhere for thousands!'''
I must tell one more story, which has
192 The English Admirals
lately been made familiar to us all, and that
in one of the noblest ballads in the English
language. I had written my tame prose
abstract, I shall beg the reader to believe,
when I had no notion that the sacred bard
designed an immortality for Greenville. Sir
Richard Greenville was Vice -Admiral to
Lord Thomas Howard, and lay off the
Azores with the English squadron in 1591.
He was a noted tyrant to his crew : a dark,
bullying fellow apparently ; and it is related
of him that he would chew and swallow
wineglasses, by way of convivial levity, till
the blood ran out of his mouth. When the
Spanish fleet of fifty sail came within sight
of the English, his ship, the Revenge, was the
last to weigh anchor, and was so far circum-
vented by the Spaniards, that there were but
two courses open — either to turn her back
upon the enemy or sail through one of his
squadrons. The first alternative Greenville
dismissed as dishonourable to himself, his
country, and her Majesty's ship. Accordingly,
he chose the latter, and steered into the
The English Admirals 193
Spanish armament. Several vessels he forced
to luff and fall under his lee ; until, about
three o'clock of the afternoon, a great ship of
three decks of ordnance took the wind out of
his sails, and immediately boarded. Thence-
forward, and all night long, the Revenge held
her own single-handed against the Spaniards.
As one ship was beaten off, another took its
place. She endured, according to Raleigh's
computation, " eight hundred shot of great
artillery, besides many assaults and entries."
By morning the powder was spent, the pikes
all broken, not a stick was standing, "nothing
left overhead either for flight or defence ;"
six feet of water in the hold ; almost all the
men hurt ; and Greenville himself in a dying
condition. To bring them to this pass, a
fleet of fifty sail had been mauling them for
fifteen hours, the Admiral of the Hidks and
the Ascension of Seville had both gone down
alongside, and two other vessels had taken
refuge on shore in a sinking state. In
Hawke's words, they had "taken a great
deal of drubbing." The captain and crew
194 The English Admirals
thought they had done about enough ; but
Greenville was not of this opinion ; he gave
orders to the master gunner, whom he knew
to be a fellow after his own stamp, to scuttle
the Revenge where she lay. The others, who
were not mortally wounded like the Admiral,
interfered with some decision, locked the
master gunner in his cabin, after having
deprived him of his sword, for he manifested
an intention to kill himself if he were not to
sink the ship ; and sent to the Spaniards to
demand terms. These were granted. The
second or third day after, Greenville died of
his wounds aboard the Spanish flagship,
leaving his contempt upon the " traitors and
dogs " who had not chosen to do as he did,
and engage fifty vessels, well found and fully
manned, with six inferior craft ravaged by
sickness and short of stores. He at least, he
said, had done his duty as he was bound to
do, and looked for everlasting fame.
Some one said to me the other day that
they considered this story to be of a pestilent
example. I am not inclined to imagine we
The English Admirals 195
shall ever be put into any practical difficulty
from a superfluity of Greenvilles. And
besides, I demur to the opinion. The worth of
such actions is not a thing to be decided in
a quaver of sensibility or a flush of righteous
commonsense. The man who wished to
make the ballads of his country, coveted a
small matter compared to what Richard
Greenville accomplished. I wonder how
many people have been Inspired by this mad
story, and how many battles have been
actually won for England in the spirit thus
engendered. It is only with a measure of
habitual foolhardiness that you can be sure,
in the common run of men, of courage on a
reasonable occasion. An army or a fleet, if
it is not led by quixotic fancies, will not be
led far by terror of the Provost Marshal.
Even German warfare, in addition to maps
and telegraphs, is not above employing the
Wacht am Rhein. Nor Is it only in the pro-
fession of arms that such stories may do good
to a man. In this desperate and gleeful
fighting, whether It Is Greenville or Benbow,
1 96 The English Admirals
Hawke or Nelson, who flies his colours in
the ship, we see men brought to the test and
giving proof of what we call heroic feeling.
Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in my club
smoking-room, that they are a prey to pro-
digious heroic feelings, and that it costs them
more nobility of soul to do nothing in parti-
cular, than would carry on all the wars, by
sea or land, of bellicose humanity. It may
very well be so, and yet not touch the point
in question. For what I desire is to see
some of this nobility brought face to face
with me in an inspiriting achievement. A
man may talk smoothly over a cigar in my
club smoking-room from now to the Day of
Judgment, without adding anything to man-
kind's treasury of illustrious and encouraging
examples. It is not over the virtues of a
curate-and-tea-party novel, that people are
abashed into high resolutions. It may be
because their hearts are crass, but to stir
them properly they must have men entering
into glory with some pomp and circumstance.
And that is why these stories of our sea-
The English Admirals 197
captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and
full of bracing moral influence, are more
valuable to England than any material bene-
fit in all the books of political economy be-
tween Westminster and Birmingham. Green-
ville chewing wineglasses at table makes no
very pleasant figure, any more than a thou-
sand other artists when they are viewed in
the body, or met in private life ; but his
work of art, his finished tragedy, is an eloquent
performance ; and I contend it ought not
only to enliven men of the sword as they go
into battle, but send back merchant clerks
with more heart and spirit to their book-
keeping by double entry.
There is another question which seems
bound up in this ; and that is Temple's
problem : whether it was wise of Douglas to
burn with the Royal Oak ? and by implica-
tion, what it was that made him do so ?
Many will tell you it was the desire of fame.
" To what do Caesar and Alexander owe
the infinite grandeur of their renown, but to
fortune ? How many men has she extin-
19^ The E)iglish Admirals
gulshcd in the beginning of their progress,
of whom we have no knowledge ; who
brought as much coin*age to the work as
they, if their aciverse hap had not cut them
off in the first salh' of their arms ? Amongst
so many and so great dangers, I do not
remember to have an)'where read that Caesar
was ever wounded ; a thousand have fallen
in less dangers than the least of these he
went through. A great many brave actions
must be expected to be performed without
witness, for one that comes to some notice.
A man is not always at the top of a breach,
or at the head of an army in the sight of
his general, as upon a platform. He is
often surprised between the hedge and the
ditch ; he must run the hazard of his life
against a henroost ; he must dislodge four
rascally musketeers out of a barn ; he must
prick out single from his party, as necessity
arises, and meet adventures alone."
Thus far Montaigne, in a characteristic
essay on Glory. Where death is certain, as
in the cases of Douglas or Greenville, it
The English Admirals 199
seems all one from a personal point of view.
The man who lost his life against a henroost,
is in the same pickle with him who lost his
life against a fortified place of the first order.
Whether he has missed a peerage or only
the corporal's stripes, it is all one if he has
missed them and is quietly in the grave.
It was by a hazard that we learned the
conduct of the four marines of the Wager.
There was no room for these brave fellows in
the boat, and they were left behind upon the
island to a certain death. They were soldiers,
they said, and knew well enough it was their
business to die ; and as their comrades
pulled away, they stood upon the beach,
gave three cheers, and cried " God bless the
king !" Now, one or two of those who were
in the boat escaped, against all likelihood,
to tell the story. That was a great thing
for us ; but surely it cannot, by any possible
twisting of human speech, be construed into
anything great for the marines. You may
suppose, if you like, that they died hoping
their behaviour would not be forgotten ; or
200 The English Admirals
you may suppose they thought nothing on
the subject, which is much more likely.
What can be the signification of the word
" fame " to a private of marines, who cannot
read and knows nothing of past history
beyond the reminiscences of his grandmother?
But whichever supposition you make, the
fact is unchanged. They died while the ques-
tion still hung in the balance ; and I suppose
their bones were already white, before the
winds and the waves and the humour of
Indian chiefs and Spanish governors had
decided whether they were to be unknown
and useless martyrs or honoured heroes.
Indeed, I believe this is the lesson : if it is
for fame that men do brave actions, they
are only silly fellows after all.
It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank
business to decompose actions into little
personal motives, and explain heroism away.
The Abstract Bagman will grow like an
Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful carping,
but in a heat of admiration. But there is
another theory of the personal motive in
The English Admirals 201
these fine sayings and doings, which I believe
to be true and wholesome. People usually
do things, and suffer martyrdoms, because
they have an inclination that way. The
best artist is not the man who fixes his eye
on posterity, but the one who loves the
practice of his art. And instead of having
a taste for being successful merchants and
retiring at thirty, some people have a taste
for high and what we call heroic forms of
excitement. If the Admirals courted war
like a mistress ; if, as the drum beat to
quarters, the sailors came gaily out of the
forecastle, — it is because a fight is a period
of multiplied and intense experiences, and,
by Nelson's computation, worth " thousands "
to any one who has a heart under his jacket.
If the marines of the Wager gave three
cheers and cried "God bless the king," it
was because they liked to do things nobly
for their own satisfaction. They were giving
their lives, there was no help for that ; and
they made it a point of self-respect to ^\vq
them handsomely. And there were never
202 The English Admirals
four happier marines in God's world than
these four at that nfioment. If it was worth
thousands to be at the Baltic, I wish a
Benthamite arithmetician would calculate
how much it was worth to be one of these
four marines ; or how much their story is
worth to each of us who read it. And mark
you, undemonstrative men would have spoiled
the situation. The finest action is the better
for a piece of purple. If the soldiers of the
Birkenhead had not gone down in line, or
these marines of the Wager had walked
away simply into the island, like plenty of
other brave fellows in the like circumstances,
my Benthamite arithmetician would assign a
far lower value to the two stories. We have
to desire a grand air in our heroes ; and
such a knowledge of the human stage as
shall make them put the dots on their own i's,
and leave us in no suspense as to when they
mean to be heroic. And hence, we should
congratulate ourselves upon the fact that
our Admirals were not only great-hearted
but big-spoken.
The E7iglish Admirals 203
The heroes themselves say, as often as not,
that fame is their object ; but I do not think
that is much to the purpose. People generally
say what they have been taught to say ;
that was the catchword they were given in
youth to express the aims of their way of
life ; and men who are gaining great battles
are not likely to take much trouble in
reviewing their sentiments and the words
in which they were told to express them.
Almost every person, if you will believe him-
self, holds a quite different theory of life
from the one on which he is patently acting.
And the fact is, fame may be a forethought
and an afterthought, but it is too abstract
an idea to move people greatly in moments
of swift and momentous decision. It is from
something more immediate, some determina-
tion of blood to the head, some trick of the
fancy, that the breach is stormed or the
bold word spoken. I am sure a fellow
shooting an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly
as much thought about fame as most com-
manders going into battle ; and yet the action,
204 The English Adinirals
fall out how it will, is not one of those the
muse delights to celebrate. Indeed it is
difficult to see why the fellow does a thing
so nameless and yet so formidable to look
at, unless on the theory that he likes it.
I suspect that is why ; and I suspect it is
at least ten per cent of why Lord Beacons-
field and Mr. Gladstone have debated so
much in the House of Commons, and why
Burnaby rode to Khiva the other day, and
why the Admirals courted war like a
mistress.
SOME PORTRAITS BY
RAEBURN
n^HROUGH the initiative of a prominent
citizen, Edinburgh has been in possession,
for some autumn weeks, of a gallery ot
paintings of singular merit and interest.
They were exposed in the apartments of the
Scotch Academy ; and filled those who are
accustomed to visit the annual spring exhibi-
tion, with astonishment and a sense of in-
congruity. Instead of the too common purple
sunsets, and pea-green fields, and distances
executed in putty and hog's lard, he beheld,
looking down upon him from the walls of
room after room, a whole army of wise, grave,
humorous, capable, or beautiful countenances,
painted simply and strongly by a man of
genuine instinct. It was a complete act of
2o6 Some Porii-aits by Raeburn
the Human Drawing-Room Comedy. Lords
and ladies, soldiers and doctors, hanging
judges, and heretical divines, a whole genera-
tion of good society was resuscitated ; and
the Scotchman of to-day walked about among
the Scotchmen of two generations ago. The
moment was well chosen, neither too late
nor too early. The people who sat for these
pictures are not yet ancestors, they are still
relations. They are not yet altogether a
part of the dusty past, but occupy a middle
distance within cry of our affections. The
little child who looks wonderingly on his
grandfather's watch in the picture, is now
the veteran Sheriff euieritus of Perth. And
I hear a story of a lady who returned the
other day to Edinburgh, after an absence of
sixty years : " I could see none of my old
friends," she said, " until I went into the
Raeburn Gallery, and found them all there."
It would be difficult to say whether the
collection was more interesting on the score of
unity or diversity. Where the portraits were
all of the same period, almost all of the same
Some Portraits by Raeburn 207
race, and all from the same brush, there
could not fail to be many points of similarity.
And yet the similarity of the handling seems
to throw into more vigorous relief those
personal distinctions which Raeburn was so
quick to seize. He was a born painter of
portraits. He looked people shrewdly be-
tween the eyes, surprised their manners in
their face, and had possessed himself of what
was essential in their character before they
had been many minutes in his studio. What
he was so swift to perceive, he conveyed to
the canvas almost in the moment of concep-
tion. He had never any difficulty, he said,
about either hands or faces. About draperies
or light or composition, he might see room
for hesitation or afterthought. But a face
or a hand was something plain and legible.
There were no two ways about it, any more
than about the person's name. And so each
of his portraits are not only (in Doctor
Johnson's phrase, aptly quoted on the cata-
logue) " a piece of history," but a piece of
biography into the bargain. It is devoutly
20 8 Some Portraits by Raeburn
to be wished that all biography were equally
amusing, and carried its own credentials
equally upon its face. These portraits are
racier than many anecdotes, and more com-
plete than many a volume of sententious
memoirs. You can see whether you get a
stronger and clearer idea of Robertson the
historian from Raeburn's palette or Dugald
Stewart's woolly and evasive periods. And
then the portraits are both signed and
countersigned. For you have, first, the
authority of the artist, whom you recognise
as no mean critic of the looks and manners
of men ; and next you have the tacit aquies-
cence of the subject, who sits looking out
upon you with inimitable innocence, and
apparently under the impression that he is
in a room by himself For Raeburn could
plunge at once through all the constraint
and embarrassment of the sitter, and present
the face, clear, open, and intelligent as at the
most disengaged moments. This is best
seen in portraits where the sitter is repre-
sented in some appropriate action : Neil
Some Portraits by Raeburn 209
Gow with his fiddle, Doctor Spens shooting
an arrow, or Lord Bannatyne hearing a
cause. Above all, from this point of view,
the portrait of Lieutenant-Colonel Lyon is
notable. A strange enough young man,
pink, fat about the lower part of the face,
with a lean forehead, a narrow nose and a fine
nostril, sits with a drawing-board upon his
knees. He has just paused to render him-
self account of some difficulty, to disentangle
some complication of line or compare neigh-
bouring values. And there, without any
perceptible wrinkling, you have rendered for
you exactly the fixed look in the eyes, and
the unconscious compression of the mouth,
that befit and signify an effort of the kind.
The whole pose, the whole expression, is
absolutely direct and simple. You are ready
to take your oath to it that Colonel Lyon
had no idea he was sitting for his picture,
and thought of nothing in the world besides
his own occupation of the moment.
Although the collection did not embrace,
I understand, nearly the whole of Raeburn's
2 1 o Some Portraits by Raeburn
works, it was too large not to contain some
that were indifferent, whether as works of art
or as portraits. Certainly the standard was
remarkably high, and was wonderfully main-
tained, but there were one or two pictures
that might have been almost as well away —
one or two that seemed wanting in salt, and
some that you can only hope were not suc-
cessful likenesses. Neither of the portraits
of Sir Walter Scott, for instance, were very
agreeable to look upon. You do not care to
think that Scott looked quite so rustic and
puffy. And where is that peaked forehead
which, according to all written accounts and
many portraits, was the distinguishing char-
acteristic of his face ? Again, in spite of his
own satisfaction and in spite of Dr. John
Brown, I cannot consider that Raeburn was
very happy in hands. Without doubt, he
could paint one if he had taken the trouble
to study it ; but it was by no means always
that he gave himself the trouble. Looking
round one of these rooms hung about with
his portraits, you were struck with the array
Some Portraits by Raeburn 2 1 1
of expressive faces, as compared with what
you may have seen in looking round a room
full of living people. But it was not so
with the hands. The portraits differed from
each other in face perhaps ten times as much
as they differed by the hand ; whereas with
living people the two go pretty much together ;
and where one is remarkable, the other will
almost certainly not be commonplace.
One interesting portrait was that of Duncan
of Camperdown. He stands in uniform be-
side a table, his feet slightly straddled with
the balance of an old sailor, his hand poised
upon a chart by the finger tips. The mouth
is pursed, the nostril spread and drawn up,
the eyebrows very highly arched. The
cheeks lie along the jaw in folds of iron, and
have the redness that comes from much
exposure to salt sea winds. From the whole
figure, attitude and countenance, there breathes
something precise and decisive, something
alert, wiry, and strong. You can understand,
from the look of him, that sense, not so much
of humour, as of what is grimmest and driest
2 1 2 Some Portraits by Raeburn
in pleasantry, which inspired his address
before the fight at Camperdown. He had
just overtaken the Dutch fleet under Admiral
de Winter. '' Gentlemen," says he, " you see
a severe winter approaching ; I have only to
advise you to keep up a good fire." Some-
what of this same spirit of adamantine
drollery must have supported him in the
days of the mutiny at the Nore, when he lay
off the Texel with his own flagship, the
Venerable, and only one other vessel, and
kept up active signals, as though he had a
powerful fleet in the offing, to intimidate the
Dutch.
Another portrait which irresistibly attracted
the eye, was the half-length of Robert
M'Queen, of Braxfield, Lord Justice-Clerk.
If I know gusto in painting when I see it,
this canvas was painted with rare enjoyment.
The tart, rosy, humorous look of the man,
his nose like a cudgel, his face resting squarely
on the jowl,, has been caught and perpetuated
with something that looks like brotherly love.
A peculiarly subtle expression haunts the
Some Portraits by Raeburn 2 1 3
lower part, sensual and incredulous, like that
of a man tasting good Bordeaux with half a
fancy it has been somewhat too long uncorked.
From under the pendulous eyelids of old age,
the eyes look out with a half-youthful, half-
frosty twinkle. Hands, with no pretence to
distinction, are folded on the judge's stomach.
So sympathetically is the character conceived
by the portrait painter, that it is hardly pos-
sible to avoid some movement of sympathy
on the part of the spectator. And sympathy
is a thing to be encouraged, apart from
humane considerations, because it supplies
us with the materials for wisdom. It is prob-
ably more instructive to entertain a sneaking
kindness for any unpopular person, and,
among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, than to
give way to perfect raptures of moral indig-
nation against his abstract vices. He was
the last judge on the Scotch bench to employ
the pure Scotch idiom. His opinions, thus
given in Doric, and conceived in a lively,
rugged, conversational style, were full of
point and authority. Out of the bar, or off
2 1 4 So77te Portraits by Raeburn
the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover of
wine, and one who " shone peculiarly " at
tavern meetings. He has left behind him
an unrivalled reputation for rough and cruel
speech ; and to this day his name smacks of
the gallows. It was he who presided at the
trials of Muir and Skirving in 1793 and
1794; and his appearance on these occa-
sions was scarcely cut to the pattern of
to-day. His summing up on Muir began
thus — the reader must supply for himself
" the growling, blacksmith's voice " and the
broad Scotch accent : " Now this is the ques-
tion for consideration — Is the panel guilty of
sedition, or is he not ? Now, before this can
be answered, two things must be attended to
that require no proof : Firsts that the British
constitution is the best that ever was since
the creation of the world, and it is not possible
to make it better." It's a pretty fair start,
is it not, for a political trial ? A little later,
he has occasion to refer to the relations of
Muir with " those wretches," the French. " I
never liked the French all my days," said his
Some Portraits by Raeburn 2 1 5
lordship, " but now I hate them." And yet
a little further on: "A government in any
country should be like a corporation ; and
in this country it is made up of the landed
interest, which alone has a right to be repre-
sented. As for the rabble who have nothing
but personal property, what hold has the
nation of them ? They may pack up their
property on their backs, and leave the country
in the twinkling of an eye." After having
made profession of sentiments so cynically
anti-popular as these, when the trials were at
an end, which was generally about midnight,
Braxfield would walk home to his house in
George Square with no better escort than an
easy conscience. I think I see him getting
his cloak about his shoulders, and, with per-
haps a lantern in one hand, steering his way
along the streets in the mirk January night.
It might have been that very day that Skirv-
ing had defied him in these words : " It is
altogether unavailing for your lordship to
menace me ; for I have long learned to fear
not the face of man ;" and I can fancy, as
2 1 6 Some Portraits by Raeburn
Braxfield reflected on the number of what he
called Griiinbletoiiians in Edinburgh, and of
how many of them must bear special malice
against so upright and inflexible a judge,
nay, and might at that very moment be
lurking in the mouth of a dark close with
hostile intent — I can fancy that he indulged
in a sour smile, as he reflected that he also
was not especially afraid of men's faces or
men's fists, and had hitherto found no occa-
sion to embody this insensibility in heroic
words. For if he was an inhumane old
gentleman (and I am afraid it is a fact that
he was inhumane), he was also perfectly
Intrepid. You may look into the queer face
of that portrait for as long as you will, but
you will not see any hole or corner for
timidity to enter in.
Indeed, there would be no end to this
paper if I were even to name half of the
portraits that were remarkable for their exe-
cution, or interesting by association. There
was one picture of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane
Hill, which you might palm off upon most
Some Portraits by Raeburn 2 1 7
laymen as a Rembrandt ; and close by, you
saw the white head of John Clerk, of Eldin,
that country gentleman who, playing with
pieces of cork on his own dining-table, in-
vented modern naval warfare. There was
that portrait of Neil Gow, to sit for which
the old fiddler walked daily through the
streets of Edinburgh arm in arm with the
Duke of Athole. There was good Harry
Erskine, with his satirical nose and upper lip,
and his mouth just open for a witticism to
pop out ; Hutton the geologist, in quakerish
raiment, and looking altogether trim and
narrow, and as if he cared more about fossils
than young ladies ; full-blown John Robieson,
in hyperbolical red dressing-gown, and, every
inch of him, a fine old man of the world ;
Constable the publisher, upright beside a
table, and bearing a corporation with com-
mercial dignity ; Lord Bannatyne hearing a
cause, if ever anybody heard a cause since
the world began ; Lord Newton just awakened
from clandestine slumber on the bench ; and
the second President Dundas, with every
2 1 8 Some Portraits by Raeburn
feature so fat that he reminds you, in his
wie, of some droll old court officer in an
illustrated nursery story-book, and yet all
these fat features instinct with meaning, the
fat lips curved and compressed, the nose
combining somehow the dignity of a beak
with the good nature of a bottle, and the
very double chin with an air of intelligence
and insight. And all these portraits are so
pat and telling, and look at you so spiritedly
from the walls, that, compared with the sort
of living people one sees about the streets,
they are as bright new sovereigns to fishy
and obliterated sixpences. Some disparaging
thoughts upon our own generation could
hardly fail to present themselves ; but it is
perhaps only the sacer vates who is wanting ;
and we also, painted by such a man as
Carolus Duran, may look in holiday immor-
tality upon our children and grandchildren.
Raeburn's young women, to be frank, are
by no means of the same order of merit. No
one, of course, could be insensible to the
presence of Miss Janet Suttie or Mrs. Camp-
Some Po7'traits by Raebitr7i 2 1 9
bell of Possil. When things are as pretty as
that, criticism is out of season. But, on the
whole, it is only with womeh of a certain age
that he can be said to have succeeded, in at
all the same sense as we say he succeeded
with men. The younger women do not seem
to be made of good flesh and blood. They
are not painted in rich and unctuous touches.
They are dry and diaphanous. And although
young ladies in Great Britain are all that can
be desired of them, I would fain hope they
are not quite so much of that as Raeburn
would have us believe. In all these pretty
faces, you miss character, you miss fire, you
miss that spice of the devil which is worth
all the prettiness in the world ; and what is
worst of all, you miss sex. His young ladies
are not womanly to nearly the same degree
as his men are masculine ; they are so in a
negative sense ; in short, they are the typical
young ladies of the male novelist.
To say truth, either Raeburn was timid
with young and pretty sitters ; or he had
stupefied himself with sentimentalities ; or
2 20 So77ie Portraits by Raeburn
else (and here is about the truth of it)
Raeburn and the rest of us labour under an
obstinate blindness in one direction, and
know very little more about women after
all these centuries than Adam when he first
saw Eve. This is all the more likely, because
we are by no means so unintelligent in the
matter of old women. There are some
capital old women, it seems to me, in books
written by men. And Raeburn has some,
such as Mrs. Colin Campbell, of Park, or
the anonymous " Old lady with a large cap,"
which are done in the same frank, perspica-
cious spirit as the very best of his men. He
could look into their eyes without trouble ;
and he was not withheld, by any bashful
sentimentalism, from recognising what he
saw there and unsparingly putting it down
upon the canvas. But where people cannot
meet without some confusion and a good
deal of involuntary humbug, and are occupied,
for as long as they are together, with a very
different vein of thought, there cannot be
much room for intelligent study nor much
SoTm Portraits by Raeburn 221
result in the shape of genuine comprehension.
Even women, who understand men so well
for practical purposes, do not know them
well enough for the purposes of art. Take
even the very best of their male creations,
take Tito Melema, for instance, and you will
find he has an equivocal air, and every now
and again remembers he has a comb at the
back of his head. Of course, no woman will
believe this, and many men will be so very
polite as to humour their incredulity.
CHILD'S PLAY
T^HE regret we have for our childhood is
not wholly justifiable : so much a man
may lay down without fear of public ribaldry ;
for although we shake our heads over the
change, we are not unconscious of the mani-
fold advantages of our new state. What we
lose in generous impulse, we more than gain
in the habit of generously watching others ;
and the capacity to enjoy Shakespeare may
balance a lost aptitude for playing at soldiers.
Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover ;
we no longer see the devil in the bed-curtains
nor lie awake to listen to the wind. We
go to school no more ; and if we have only
exchanged one drudgery for another (which
is by no means sure), we are set free for
ever from the daily fear of chastisement.
Child's Play 223
And yet a great change has overtaken us ;
and although we do not enjoy ourselves less,
at least we take our pleasure differently.
We need pickles nowadays to make Wednes-
day's cold mutton please our Friday's appetite;
and I can remember the time when to call it
red venison, and tell myself a hunter's story,
would have made it more palatable than the
best of sauces. To the grown person, cold
mutton is cold mutton all the world over ; not
all the mythology ever invented by man will
iTiake it better or worse to him ; the broad
fact, the clamant reality, of the mutton carries
away before it such seductive figments. But
for the child it is still possible to weave an
enchantment over eatables ; and if he has but
read of a dish in a story-book, it will be
heavenly manna to him for a week.
If a grown man does not like eating and
drinking and exercise, if he is not something
positive in his tastes, it means he has a
feeble body and should have some medicine ;
but children may be pure spirits, if they will,
and take their enjoyment in a world of moon-
2 24 Child's Play
shine. Sensation does not count for so much
in our first years as afterwards ; something
of the swaddling numbness of infancy clings
about us ; we see and touch and hear through
a sort of golden mist. Children, for instance,
are able enough to see, but they have no
great faculty for looking ; they do not use
their eyes for the pleasure of using them,
but for by-ends of their own ; and the things
I call to mind seeing most vividly, were not
beautiful in themselves, but merely interest-
ing or enviable to me as I thought they
might be turned to practical account in play.
Nor is the sense of touch so clean and
poignant in children as it is in a man. If
you will turn over your old memories, I think
the sensations of this sort you remember
will be somewhat vague, and come to not
much more than a blunt, general sense of heat
on summer days, or a blunt, general sense of
wellbeing in bed. And here, of course, you
will understand pleasurable sensations ; for
overmastering pain — the most deadly and
tragical element in life, and the true com-
Child's Play 225
mander of man's soul and body — alas ! pain
has its own way with all of us ; it breaks in,
a rude visitant, upon the fairy garden where
the child wanders in a dream, no less surely
than it rules upon the field of battle, or
sends the immortal war-god whimpering to
his father ; and innocence, no more than
philosophy, can protect us from this sting.
As for taste, when we bear in mind the
excesses of unmitigated sugar which delight
a youthful palate, " it is surely no very
cynical asperity " to think taste a character
of the maturer growth. Smell and hearing
are perhaps more developed ; I remember
many scents, many voices, and a great deal
of spring singing in the woods. But hearing
is capable of vast improvement as a means
of pleasure ; and there is all the world
between gaping wonderment at the jargon
of birds, and the emotion with which a man
listens to articulate music.
At the same time, and step by step with
this increase in the definition and intensity
of what we feel which accompanies our grow-
Q
2 26 Child's Play
ing age, another change takes place in the
sphere of intellect, by which all things are
transformed and seen through theories and
associations as through coloured windows.
We make to ourselves day by day, out of
history, and gossip, and economical specula-
tions, and God knows what, a medium in
which we walk and through which we look
abroad. We study shop windows with other
eyes than in our childhood, never to wonder,
not always to admire, but to make and
modify our little incongruous theories about
life. It is no longer the uniform of a soldier
that arrests our attention ; but perhaps the
flowing carriage of a woman, or perhaps a
countenance that has been vividly stamped
with passion and carries an adventurous
story written in its lines. The pleasure of
surprise is passed away; sugar -loaves and
water-carts seem mighty tame to encounter ;
and we walk the streets to make romances
and to sociologise. Nor must we deny that
a good many of us walk them solely for the
purposes of transit or in the interest of a
Child's Play 227
livelier digestion. These, indeed, may look
back with mingled thoughts upon their child-
hood, but the rest are in a better case ; they
know more, than when they were children,
they understand better, their desires and
sympathies answer more nimbly to the pro-
vocation of the senses, and their minds are
brimming with interest as they go about the
world.
According to my contention, this is a
flight to which children cannot rise. They
are wheeled in perambulators or dragged
about by nurses in a pleasing stupor. A
vague, faint, abiding wonderment possesses
them. Here and there some specially
remarkable circumstance, such as a water-
cart or a guardsman, fairly penetrates into
the seat of thought and calls them, for half
a moment, out of themselves ; and you may
see them, still towed forward sideways by
the inexorable nurse as by a sort of destiny,
but still staring at the bright object in their
wake. It may be some minutes before
another such moving spectacle reawakens
22 8 Child's Play
them to the world in which they dwell. For
other children, they almost invariably show
some intelligent sympathy. " Therf is a
fine fellow making mud pies," they seem to
say; "that I can understand, there is some
sense in mud pies." But the doings of their
elders, unless where they are speakingly
picturesque or recommend themselves by the
quality of being easily imitable, they let
them go over their heads (as we say) without
the least regard. If it were not for this
perpetual imitation, we should be tempted
to fancy they despised us outright, or only
considered us in the light of creatures brutally
strong and brutally silly ; among whom they
condescended to dwell in obedience like a
philosopher at a barbarous court. At times,
indeed, they display an arrogance of dis-
regard that is truly staggering. Once, when
I was groaning aloud with physical pain, a
young gentleman came into the room and
nonchalantly inquired if I had seen his bow
and arrow. He made no account of my
groans, which he accepted, as he had to
Child's Play 229
accept so much else, as a piece of the in-
explicable conduct of his elders ; and like a
wise young gentleman, he would waste no
wonder on the subject. Those elders, who
care so little for rational enjoyment, and are
even the enemies of rational enjoyment for
others, he had accepted without understanding
and without complaint, as the rest of us
accept the scheme of the universe.
We grown people can tell ourselves a
story, give and take strokes until the bucklers
ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall, and die ;
all the while sitting quietly by the fire or
lying prone in bed. This is exactly what a
child cannot do, or does not do, at least,
when he can find anything else. He works
all with lay figures and stage properties.
When his story comes to the fighting, he
must rise, get something by way of a sword
and have a set-to with a piece of furniture,
until he is out of breath. When he comes
to ride with the king's pardon, he must
bestride a chair, which he will so hurry and
belabour and on which he will so furiously
230 Child's Play
demean himself, that the messenger will
arrive, if not bloody with spurring, at least
fiery red with haste. If his romance involves
an accident upon a cliff, he must clamber in
person about the chest of drawers and fall
bodily upon the carpet, before his imagination
is satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all toys, in
short, are in the same category and answer
the same end. Nothing can stagger a child's
faith ; he accepts the clumsiest substitutes
and can swallow the most staring incon-
gruities. The chair he has just been besieging
as a castle, or valiantly cutting to the ground
as a dragon, is taken away forthe accommoda-
tion of a morning visitor, and he is nothing
abashed ; he can skirmish by the hour with
a stationary coal-scuttle ; in the midst of the
enchanted pleasance, he can see, without
sensible shock, the gardener soberly digging
potatoes for the day's dinner. He can make
abstraction of whatever does not fit into his
fable ; and he puts his eyes into his pocket,
just as w^e hold our noses in an unsavoury
lane. And so it is, that although the ways
Child's Play 231
of children cross with those of their elders in
a hundred places daily, they never go in the
same direction nor so much as lie in the
same element. So may the telegraph wires
intersect the line of the high-road, or so
might a landscape painter and a bagman
visit the same country, and yet move in
different worlds.
People struck with these spectacles, cry
aloud about the power of imagination in the
young. Indeed there may be two words to
that. It is, in some ways, but a pedestrian
fancy that the child exhibits. It is the
grown people who make the nursery stories ;
all the children do, is jealously to preserve
the text. One out of a dozen reasons why
Robinson Cmsoe should be so popular with
youth, is that it hits their level in this matter
to a nicety ; Crusoe was always at makeshifts
and had, in so many words, to play at a great
variety of professions ; and then the book is
all about tools, and there is nothing that
delights a child so much. Hammers and
saws belong to a province of life that positively
2 32 Child's Play
calls for imitation. The juvenile lyrical
drama, surely of the most ancient Thespian
model, wherein the trades of mankind are
successively simulated to the running burthen
'' On a cold and frosty morning," gives a
good instance of the artistic taste in children.
And this need for overt action and lay figures
testifies to a defect in the child's imagination
which prevents him from carrying out his
novels in the privacy of his own heart. He
does not yet know enough of the world and
men. His experience is incomplete. That
stage-wardrobe and scene-room that we call
the memory is so ill provided, that he can
overtake few combinations and body out few
stories, to his own content, without some
external aid. He is at the experimental
stage ; he is not sure how one would feel in
certain circumstances ; to make sure, he must
come as near trying it as his means permit.
And so here is young heroism with a wooden
sword, and mothers practice their kind voca-
tion over a bit of jointed stick. It may be
laughable enough just now; but it is these
Child's Play 233
same people and these same thoughts, that
not long hence, when they are on the theatre
of life, will make you weep and tremble.
For children think very much the same
thoughts and dream the same dreams, as
bearded men and marriageable women. No
one is more romantic. Fame and honour,
the love of young men and the love of
mothers, the business man's pleasure in
method, all these and others they anticipate
and rehearse in their play hours. Upon us,
who are further advanced and fairly dealing
with the threads of destiny, they only glance
from time to time to glean a hint for their
own mimetic reproduction. Two children
playing at soldiers are far more interesting
to each other than one of the scarlet beings
whom both are busy imitating. This is
perhaps the greatest oddity of all. " Art for
art " is their motto ; and the doings of grown
folk are only interesting as the raw material
for play. Not Theophile Gautier, not Flau-
bert, can look more callously upon life, or
rate the reproduction more highly over the
2 34 Child's Play
reality ; and they will parody an execution,
a deathbed, or the funeral of the young man
of Nain, with all the cheerfulness in the
world.
The true parallel for play is not to be
found, of course, in conscious art, which,
though it be derived from play, is itself an
abstract, impersonal thing, and depends
largely upon philosophical interests beyond
the scope of childhood. It is when we make
castles in the air and personate the leading
character in our own romances, that we
return to the spirit of our first years. Only,
there are several reasons why the spirit is no
longer so agreeable to indulge. Nowadays,
when we admit this personal element into
our divagations we are apt to stir up uncom-
fortable and sorrowful memories, and remind
ourselves sharply of old wounds. Our day-
dreams can no longer lie all in the air like a
story in the Arabian Nights ; they read to
us rather like the history of a period in which
we ourselves had taken part, where we come
across many unfortunate passages and find our
Child's Play 235
own conduct smartly reprimanded. And then
the child, mind you, acts his parts. He does
not merely repeat them to himself; he leaps,
he runs, and sets the blood agog over all his
body. And so his play breathes him ; and
he no sooner assumes a passion than he gives
it vent. Alas ! when we betake ourselves
to our intellectual form of play, sitting quietly
by the fire or lying prone in bed, we rouse
many hot feelings for which we can find no
outlet. Substitutes are not acceptable to
the mature mind, which desires the thing
itself; and even to rehearse a triumphant
dialogue with one's enemy, although it is
perhaps the most satisfactory piece of play
still left within our reach, is not entirely
satisfying, and is even apt to lead to a visit
and an interview which may be the reverse
of triumphant after all.
In the child's world of dim sensation, play
is all in all. " Making believe " is the gist
of his whole life, and he cannot so much as
take a walk except in character. I could
not learn my alphabet without some suitable
236 Child's Play
mise-en-scene, and had to act a business man
in an office before I could sit down to my
book. Will you kindly question your memory,
and find out how much you did, work or
pleasure, in good faith and soberness, and for
how much you had to cheat yourself with
some invention ? I remember, as though it
were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the
dignity and self-reliance, that came with a
pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when
there was none to see. Children are even
content to forego what we call the realities,
and prefer the shadow to the substance.
When they might be speaking intelligibly
together, they chatter senseless gibberish by
the hour, and are quite happy because they
are making believe to speak French. I have
said already how even the imperious appetite
of hunger suffers itself to be gulled and led
by the nose with the fag end of an old song.
And it goes deeper than this : when children
are together even a meal is felt as an inter-
ruption in the business of life ; and they
must find some imaginative sanction, and
Child's Play 237
tell themselves some sort of story, to account
for, to colour, to render entertaining, the
simple processes of eating and drinking.
What wonderful fancies I hav,e heard evolved
out of the pattern upon tea-cups! — from
which there followed a code of rules and a
whole world of excitement, until tea-drinking
began to take rank as a game. When my
cousin and I took our porridge of a morning,
we had a device to enliven the course of the
meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained
it to be a country continually buried under
snow. I took mine with milk, and explained
it to be a country suffering gradual inunda-
tion. You can imagine us exchanging
bulletins ; how here was an island still
unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered
with snow ; what inventions were made ;
how his population lived in cabins on perches
and travelled on stilts, and how mine was
always in boats ; how the interest grew
furious, as the last corner of safe ground was
cut off on all sides and grew smaller every
moment ; and how, in fine, the food was of
238 Child'' s Play
altogether secondary importance, and might
even have been nauseous, so long as we
seasoned it with these dreams. But perhaps
the most exciting moments I ever had over
a meal, were in the case of calves' feet jelly.
It was hardly possible not to believe — and
you may be sure, so far from trying, I did
all I could to favour the illusion — that some
part of it was hollow, and that sooner or
later my spoon would lay open the secret
tabernacle of the golden rock. There, might
some miniature Red Beard await his hour ;
there, might one find the treasures of the
Forty Thieves, and bewildered Cassim beat-
ing about the walls. And so I quarried on
slowly, with bated breath, savouring the
interest. Believe me, I had little palate left
for the jelly ; and though I preferred the
taste when I took cream with it, I used often
to go without, because the cream dimmed
the transparent fractures.
Even with games, this spirit is authori-
tative with right-minded children. It is thus
that hide-and-seek has so pre-eminent a
Child's Play 239
sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of
romance, and the actions and the excitement
to which it gives rise lend themselves to
almost any sort of fable. And thus cricket,
which is a mere matter of dexterity, palpably
about nothing and for no end, often fails to
satisfy infantile craving. It is a game, if
you like, but not a game of play. You
cannot tell yourself a story about cricket ;
and the activity it calls forth can be justi-
fied on no rational theory. Even football,
although it admirably simulates the tug and
the ebb and flow of battle, has presented
difficulties to the mind of young sticklers
after verisimilitude ; and I knew at least one
little boy who was mightily exercised about
the presence of the ball, and had to spirit
himself up, whenever he came to play, with
an elaborate story of enchantment, and take
the missile as a sort of talisman bandied
about in conflict between two Arabian
nations.
To think of such a frame of mind, is to
become disquieted about the bringing up of
240 Child's Play
children. Surely they dwell in a mytho-
logical epoch, and are not the contemporaries
of their parents. What can they think ol
them ? what can they make of these bearded
or petticoated giants who look down upon
their games? who move upon a cloudy
Olympus, following unknown designs apart
from rational enjoyment ? who profess the
tenderest solicitude for children, and yet
every now and again reach down out of their
altitude and terribly vindicate the preroga-
tives of age ? Off goes the child, corporally
smarting, but morally rebellious. Were there
ever such unthinkable deities as parents ? I
would give a great deal to know what, ir
nine rases out of ten, is the child's unvar-
nished feeling. A sense of past cajolery ; a
sense of personal attraction, at best very
feeble ; above all, I should imagine, a sense
of terror for the untried residue of mankind :
go to make up the attraction that he feels.
No wonder, poor little heart, with such a
weltering world in front of him, if he clings
to the hand he knows ! The dread irration-
Child's Play 241
ality of the whole affair, as it seems to
children, is a thing we are all too ready to
forget. " O, why," I remember passionately
wondering, "why can we not all be happy
and devote ourselves to play?" And when
children do philosophise, I believe it is
usually to very much the same purpose.
One thing, at least, comes very clearly out
of these considerations ; that whatever we
are to expect at the hands of children, it
should not be any peddling exactitude about
matters of fact. They walk in a vain show,
and among mists and rainbows ; they are
passionate after dreams and unconcerned
about realities ; speech is a difficult art not
wholly learned ; and there is nothing in their
own tastes or purposes to teach them what
we mean by abstract truthfulness. When a
bad writer is inexact, even if he can look
back on half a century of years, we charge
him with incompetence and not with dis-
honesty. And why not extend the same
allowance to imperfect speakers? Let a
stockbroker be dead stupid about poetry, or
242 Child's Play
a poet Inexact in the details of business, and
we excuse them heartily from blame. But
show us a miserable, unbreeched, human
entity, whose whole profession it Is to take a
tub for a fortified town and a shaving-brush
for the deadly stiletto, and who passes three-
fourths of his time In a dream and the rest
in open self-deception, and we expect him
to be as nice upon a matter of fact as a
scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon
my heart, I think it less than decent. You
do not consider how little the child sees, or
how swift he Is to weave what he has seen
into bewildering fiction ; and that he cares
no more for what you call truth, than you
for a gingerbread dragoon.
I am reminded, as I write, that the child
is very Inquiring as to the precise truth of
stories. But Indeed this Is a very different
matter, and one bound up with the subject of
play, and the precise amount of playfulness,
or playabillty, to be looked for in the world.
Many such burning questions must arise in
the course of nursery education. Among
Child's Play 243
the fauna of this planet, which already
embraces the pretty soldier and the terrifying
Irish beggarman, is, or is not, the child to
expect a Bluebeard or a Cormoran ? Is he,
or is he not, to look out for magicians,
kindly and potent ? May he, or may he not,
reasonably hope to be cast away upon a
desert island, or turned to such diminutive
proportions that he can live on equal terms
with his lead soldiery, and go a cruise in his
own toy schooner ? Surely all these are
practical questions to a neophyte entering
upon life with a view to play. Precision
upon such a point, the child can understand.
But if you merely ask him of his past
behaviour, as to who threw such a stone, for
instance, or struck such and such a match ;
or whether he had looked into a parcel or
gone by a lorbidden path, — why, he can see
no moment in the inquiry, and it is ten to
one, he has already halt forgotten and half
bemused himself with subsequent imaginings.
It would be easy to leave them in their
native cloudland, where they figure so prettily
244 Child's Play •
— pretty like flowers and innocent like dogs.
They will come out of their gardens soon
enough, and have to go into offices and the
witness-box. Spare them yet a while, O
conscientious parent ! Let them doze among
their playthings yet a little ! for who knows
what a rough, warfaring existence lies before
them in the future ?
WALKING TOURS
TT must not be imagined that a walking
tour, as some would have us fancy, is
merely a better or worse way of seeing the
country. There are . many ways of seeing
landscape quite as good ; and none more
vivid, in spite of canting dilettantes, than
from a railway train. But landscape on a
walking tour is quite accessory. He who is
indeed of the brotherhood does not voyage
in quest of the picturesque, but of certain
jolly humours — of the hope and spirit with
which the march begins at morning, and the
peace and spiritual repletion of the evening's
rest. He cannot tell whether he puts his
knapsack on, or takes it off, with more
delight. The excitement of the departure
puts him in key for that of the arrival.
246 Walking Tours
Whatever he does is not only a reward in
itself, but will be further rewarded in the
sequel ; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure
in an endless chain. It is this that so few
can understand ; they will either be always
lounging or always at five miles an hour ;
they do not play off the one against the
other, prepare all day for the evening, and
all evening for the next day. And, above
all, it is here that your overwalker fails of
comprehension. His heart rises against those
who drink their curagoa in liqueur glasses,
when he himself can swill it in a brown John.
He will not believe that the flavour is more
delicate in the smaller dose. He will not
believe that to walk this unconscionable
distance is merely to stupefy and brutalise
himself, and come to his inn, at night, with a
sort of frost on his five wits, and a starless
night of darkness in his spirit. Not for him
the mild luminous evening of the temperate
walker ! He has nothing left of man but a
physical need for bedtime and a double
nightcap ; and even his pipe, if he be a
Walking Tours 247
smoker, will be savourless and disenchanted.
It is the fate of such an one to take twice as
much trouble as is needed to obtain happi-
ness, and miss the happiness in the end ,• he
is the man of the proverb, in short, who goes
further and fares worse.
Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking
tour should be gone upon alone. If you go
in a company, or even in pairs, it is no longer
a walking tour in anything but name ; it is
something else and more in the nature of a
picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon
alone, because freedom is of the essence ;
because you should be able to stop and go
on, and follow this way or that, as the freak
takes you ; and because you must have your
own pace, and neither trot alongside a
champion walker, nor mince in time with a
girl. And then you must be open to all
impressions and let your thoughts take colour
from what you see. You should be as a
pipe for any wind to play upon. " I cannot
see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of walking and
talking at the same time. When I am in
248 Walking Tours
the country I wish to vegetate like the
country," — which is the gist of all that can
be said upon the matter. There should be
no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on
the meditative silence of the morning. And
so long as a man is reasoning he cannot
surrender himself to that fine intoxication
that comes of much motion in the open air,
that begins in a sort of dazzle and sluggish-
ness of the brain, and ends in a peace that
passes comprehension.
During the first day or so of any tour
there are moments of bitterness, when the
traveller feels more than coldly towards his
knapsack, when he is half in a mind to throw
it bodily over the hedge and, like Christian
on a similar occasion, "give three leaps and
go on singing." And yet it soon acquires a
property of easiness. It becomes magnetic ;
the spirit of the journey enters into it. And
no sooner have you passed the straps over
your shoulder than the lees of sleep are
cleared from you, you pull yourself together
with a shake, and fall at once into your
Walking Tour's 249
stride. And surely, of all possible moods,
this, in which a man takes the road, is the
best. Of course, if he zuill keep thinking of
his anxieties, if he zvill open the merchant
Abudah's chest and walk arm-in-arm with
the hag — why, wherever he is, and whether
he walk fast or slow, the chances are that he
will not be happy. And so much the more
shame to himself! There are perhaps thirty
men setting forth at that same hour, and I
would lay a large wager there is not another
dull face among the thirty. It would be a
fine thing to follow, in a coat of darkness,
one after another of these wayfarers, some
summer morning, for the first few miles upon
the road. This one, who walks fast, with a
keen look in his eyes, is all concentrated in
his own mind ; he is up at his loom, weaving
and weaving, to set the landscape to words.
This one peers about, as he goes, among the
grasses ; he waits by the canal to watch the
dragon-flies ; he leans on the gate of the
pasture, and cannot look enough upon the
complacent kine. And here comes another,
2 50 Walking Tours
talking, laughing, and gesticulating to himself.
His face changes from time to time, as
indignation flashes from his eyes or anger
clouds his forehead. He is composing
articles, deliverincr orations, and conductincf
the most impassioned interviews, by the
way. A little farther on, and it is as like as
not he will begin to sing. And well for
him, supposing him to be no great master in
that art, if he stumble across no stolid peasant
at a corner ; for on such an occasion, I
scarcely know which is the more troubled, or
whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of
your troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of
your clown. A sedentary population, accus-
tomed, besides, to the strange mechanical
bearing of the common tramp, can in no
wise explain to itself the gaiety of these
passers-by. I knew one man who was
arrested as a runaway lunatic, because, al-
though a full-grown person with a red beard,
he skipped as he went like a child. And
you would be astonished if I were to tell you
all the grave and learned heads who have
Walking Tours 2 5 1
confessed to me that, when on walking tours,
they sang — and sang very ill — and had a
pair of red ears when, as described above, the
inauspicious peasant plumped into their arms
from round a corner. And here, lest you
should think I am exaggerating, is Hazlitt's
own confession, from his essay On Going a
JotLvney^ which is so good that there should
be a tax levied on all who have not read
it: —
" Give me the clear blue sky over my
head," says he, " and the green turf beneath
my feet, a winding road before me, and a
three hours' march to dinner — and then to
thinking ! It is hard if I cannot start some
game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run,
I leap, I sing for joy."
Bravo ! After that adventure of my friend
with the policeman, you would not have
cared, would you, to publish that in the first
person ? But we have no bravery nowadays,
and, even in books, must all pretend to be as
dull and foolish as our neighbours. It was
not so with Hazlitt. And notice how learned
252 Walking Tours
he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in
the theory of walking tours. He is none of
your athletic men in purple stockings, who
walk their fifty miles a day : three hours'
march is his ideal. And then he must have
a winding road, the epicure !
Yet there is one thing I object to in these
words of his, one thing in the great master's
practice that seems to me not wholly wise.
I do not approve of that leaping and running.
Both of these hurry the respiration ; they
both shake up the brain out of its glorious
open-air confusion ; and they both break the
pace. Uneven walking is not so agreeable
to the body, and it distracts and irritates the
mind. Whereas, when once you have fallen
into an equable stride, it requires no conscious
thought from you to keep it up, and yet it
prevents you from thinking earnestly of
anything else. Like knitting, like the work
of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises
and sets to sleep the serious activity of the
mind. We can think of this or that, lightly
and laughingly, as a child thinks, or as we
Walking Tours 253
think In a morning dose ; we can make puns
or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand
ways with words and rhymes ; but when it
comes to honest work, when we come to
gather ourselves together for an effort, we
may sound the trumpet as loud and long as
we please ; the great barons of the mind will
not rally to the standard, but sit, each one,
at home, warming his hands over his own
fire and brooding on his own private thought !
In the course of a day's walk, you see,
there is much variance in the mood. From
the exhilaration of the start, to the happy
phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly
great. As the day goes on, the traveller
moves from the one extreme towards the
other. He becomes more and more incor-
porated with the material landscape, and the
open-air drunkenness grows upon him with
great strides, until he posts along the road,
and sees everything about him, as in a cheer-
ful dream. The first is certainly brighter,
but the second stage is the more peaceful.
A man does not make so many articles to-
2 54 Walking Tours
wards the end, nor does he laugh aloud ; but
the purely animal pleasures, the sense of
physical wellbeing, the delight of every in-
halation, of every time the muscles tighten
down the thigh, console him for the absence
of the others, and bring him to his destination
still content.
Nor must I forget to say a word on
bivouacs. You come to a milestone on a
hill, or some place where deep ways meet
under trees ; and off goes the knapsack, and
down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade.
You sink into yourself, and the birds come
round and look at you ; and your smoke
dissipates upon the afternoon under the blue
dome of heaven ; and the sun lies warm upon
your feet, and the cool air visits your neck
and turns aside your open shirt. If you are
not happy, you must have an evil conscience.
You may dally as long as you like by the
roadside. It is almost as if the millennium
were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks
and watches over the housetop, and remember
time and seasons no more. Not to keep
Walking Tours 255
hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to
live for ever. You have no idea, unless you
have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's
day, that you measure out only by hunger,
and bring to an end only when you are
drowsy. I know a village where there are
hardly any clocks, where no one knows more
of the days of the week than by a sort of
instinct for the fete on Sundays, and where
only one person can tell you the day of the
month, and she is generally wrong ; and if
people were aware how slow Time journeyed
in that village, and what armfuls of spare
hours he gives, over and above the bargain,
to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would
be a stampede out of London, Liverpool,
Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the
clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours
out each one faster than the other, as though
they were all in a wager. And all these
foolish pilgrims would each bring his own
misery along * with him, in a watch-pocket !
It is to be noticed, there were no clocks and
watches in the much-vaunted days before the
256 Walking Tours
flood. It follows, of course, there were no
appointments, and punctuality was not yet
thought upon. " Though ye take from a
covetous man all his treasure," says Milton,
" he has yet one jewel left ; ye cannot deprive
him of his covetousness." And so I would
say of a modern man of business, you may
do what you will for him, put him in Eden,
give him the elixir of life — he has still a flaw
at heart, he still has his business habits.
Now, there is no time when business habits
are more mitigated than on a walking tour.
And so during these halts, as I say, you will
feel almost free.
But it is at night, and after dinner, that
the best hour comes. There are no such
pipes to be smoked as those that follow a
good day's march ; the flavour of the tobacco
is a thing to be remembered, it is so dry and
aromatic, so full and so fine. If you wind
up the evening with grog, you will own there
was never such grog ; at every sip a jocund
tranquillity spreads about your limbs, and
sits easily in your heart. If you read a book
Walking Toicrs 257
— and you will never do so save by fits and
starts — you find the language strangely racy
and harmonious ; words take a new meaning ;
single sentences possess the ear for half an
hour together ; and the writer endears him-
self to you, at every page, by the nicest
coincidence of sentiment. It seems as if it
were a book you had written yourself in a
dream. To all we have read on such occa-
sions we look back with special favour. " It
was on the loth of April, 1 798," says Hazlitt,
with amorous precision, " that I sat down to
a volume of the new Helo'ise^ at the Inn at
Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a
cold chicken.' I should wish to quote more,
for though we are mighty fine fellows nowa-
days, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And,
talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt's essays
would be a capital pocket-book on such a
journey ; so would a volume of Heine's
songs ; and for Tristram Shandy I can pledge
a fair experience.
If the evening be fine and warm, there is
nothing better in life than to lounge before
s
258 Walking Toitrs
the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the
parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds
and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that
you taste JoviaHty to the full significance of
that audacious word. Your muscles are so
agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so
strong and so idle, that whether you move or
sit still, whatever you do is done with pride
and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in
talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or
sober. And it seems as if a hot walk purged
you, more than of anything else, of all
narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to
play its part freely, as in a child or a man of
science. You lay aside all your own hobbies,
to watch provincial humours develop them-
selves before you, now as a laughable farce,
and now grave and beautiful like an old
tale.
Or perhaps you are left to your own
company for the night, and surly weather
imprisons you by the fire. You may re-
member how Burns, numbering past plea-
sures, dwells upon the hours when he has
Walking Tottrs 259
been " happy thinking." It is a phrase that
may well perplex a poor modern, girt about
on every side by clocks and chimes, and
haunted, even at night, by flaming dial-plates.
For we are all so busy, and have so many
far-off projects to realise, and castles in the
fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on
a gravel soil, that we can find no time for
pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and
among the Hills of Vanity. Changed times,
indeed, when we must sit all night, beside
the fire, with folded hands ; and a changed
world for most of us, when we find we can
pass the hours without discontent, and be
happy thinking. We are in such haste to
be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear,
to make our voice audible a moment in the
derisive silence of eternity, that we forget
that one thing, of which these are but the
parts — namely, to live. We fall in love, we
drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth
like frightened sheep. And now you are to
ask yourself if, when all is done, you would
not have been better to sit by the fire at
26o Walking Tour^
home, and be happy thinking. To sit still
and contemplate, — to remember the faces of
women without desire, to be pleased by the
great deeds of men without envy, to be
everything and everywhere in sympathy, and
yet content to remain where and what you
are — is not this to know both wisdom and
virtue, and to dwell with happiness ? After
all, it is not they who carry flags, but they
who look upon it from a private chamber,
who have the fun of the procession. And
once you are at that, you are in the very
humour of all social heresy. It is no time
for shuffling, or for big, empty words. If
you ask yourself what you mean by fame,
riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek ;
and you go back into that kingdom of light
imaginations, which seem so vain in the eyes
of Philistines perspiring after wealth, and so
momentous to those who are stricken with
the disproportions of the world, and, in the
face of the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split
differences between two degrees of the infini-
tesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe or
Walking Tours 261
the Roman Empire, a million of money or a
fiddlestick's end.
You lean from the window, your last pipe
reeking whitely into the darkness, your body
full of delicious pains, your mind enthroned
in the seventh circle of content ; when
suddenly the mood changes, the weather-
cock goes about, and you ask yourself one
question more : whether, for the interval, you
have been the wisest philosopher or the most
egregious of donkeys? Human experience
is not yet able to reply ; but at least you
have had a fine moment, and looked down
upon all the kingdoms of the earth. And
whether it was wise or foolish, to-morrow's
travel will carry you, body and mind, into
some different parish of the infinite.
PAN'S PIPES
T^HE world in which we live has been
variously said and sung by the most
ingenious poets and philosophers : these
reducing it to formulae and chemical in-
gredients, those striking the lyre in high-
sounding measures for the handiwork of
God. What experience supplies is of a
mingled tissue, and the choosing mind has
much to reject before it can get together
the materials of a theory. Dew and thunder,
destroying Atilla and the Spring lambkins,
belong to an order of contrasts which no
repetition can assimilate. There is an un-
couth, outlandish strain throughout the web
of the world, as from a vexatious planet in
the house of life. Things are not congruous
and wear strange disguises : the consummate
Paris Pipes 263
flower is fostered out of dung, and after
nourishing itself awhile with heaven's delicate
distillations, decays again into indistinguish-
able soil ; and with Csssar's ashes, Hamlet
tells us, the urchins make dirt pies and
filthily besmear their countenance. Nay,
the kindly shine of summer, when tracked
home with the scientific spyglass, is found
to issue from the most portentous nightrnare
of the universe — the great, conflagrant sun :
a world of hell's squibs, tumultuary, roaring
aloud, inimical to life. The sun itself is
enough to disgust a human being of the
scene which he inhabits ; and you would not
fancy there was a green or habitable spot in
a universe thus awfully lighted up. And yet
it is by the blaze of such a conflagration, to
which the fire of Rome was but a spark,
that we do all our fiddling, and hold domestic
tea-parties at the arbour door.
The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature,
now terribly stamping his foot, so that armies
were dispersed ; now by the woodside on a
summer noon trolling on his pipe until he
264 Pans Pipes
charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen.
And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the
last word of human experience. To certain
smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and
elastic aethers, and the hypothesis of this or
that other spectacled professor, tell a speak-
ing story ; but for youth and all ductile and
congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all
the classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph;
goat -footed, with a gleeful and an angry
look, the type of the shaggy world : and in
every wood, if you go with a spirit properly
prepared, you shall hear the note of his
pipe.
For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded
with gardens ; where the salt and tumbling
sea receives clear rivers running from among
reeds and lilies ; fruitful and austere ; a
rustic world ; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel.
What is it the birds sing among the trees
in pairing- time? What means the sound
of the rain falling far and wide upon the
leafy forest ? To what tune does the fisher-
man whistle, as he hauls in his net at morning,
Paits Pipes 265
and the bright fish are heaped inside the
boat ? These are all airs upon Pan's pipe ;
he it was who gave them breath in the
exultation of his heart, and gleefull}^ modu-
lated their outflow with his lips and fingers.
The coarse mirth of herdsmen, shaking the
dells with laughter and striking out high
echoes from the rock ; the tune of moving
feet in the lamplit city, or on the smooth
ballroom floor ; the hooves of many horses,
beating the wide pastures in alarm ; the
song of hurrying rivers ; the colour of clear
skies ; and smiles and the live touch of
hands ; and the voice of things, and their
significant look, and the renovating influence
they breathe forth — these are his joyful
measures, to which the whole earth treads in.
choral harmony. To this music the young
lambs bound as to a tabor, and the London
shop-girl skips rudely in the dance. For
it puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts ;
and to look on the happy side of nature is
common, in their hours, to all created things.
Some are vocal under a good influence, are
2 66 Pans Pipes
pleasing whenever they are pleased, and hand
on their happiness to others, as a child who,
looking upon lovely things, looks lovely.
Some leap to the strains with unapt foot,
and make a halting figure in the universal
dance. And some, like sour spectators at
the play, receive the music into their hearts
with an unmoved countenance, and walk
like strangers through the general rejoicing.
But let him feign never so carefully, there
is not a man but has his pulses shaken when
Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and sets
the world a-singing.
Alas if that were all ! But oftentimes the
air is changed ; and in the screech of the
night wind, chasing navies, subverting the
.tall ships and the rooted cedar of the hills ;
in the random deadly levin or the fury of
headlong floods, we recognise the *' dread
foundation " of life and the anger in Pan's
heart. Earth wages open war against her
children, and under her softest touch hides
treacherous claws. The cool waters invite
us in to drown ; the domestic hearth burns
Pans Pipes 267
up in the hour of sleep, and makes an end
of all. • Everything is good or bad, helpful
or deadly, not in itself, but by its circum-
stances. For a few bright days in England
the hurricane must break forth and the
North Sea pay a toll of populous ships.
And when the universal music has led lovers
into the paths of dalliance, confident of
Nature's sympathy, suddenly the air shifts
into a minor, and death makes a clutch from
his ambuscade below the bed of marriage.
For death is given in a kiss ; the dearest
kindnesses are fatal ; and into this life, where
one thing preys upon another, the child too
often makes its entrance from the mother's
corpse. It is no wonder, with so traitorous
a scheme of things, if the wise people who
created for us the idea of Pan thought that
of all fears the fear of him was the most
terrible, since it embraces all. And still we
preserve the phrase : a panic terror. To
reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too
intently for the threat that runs through all
the winning music of the world, to hold back
2 68 Pan s Pipes
the hand from the rose because of the thorn,
and from life because of death : this it is to
be afraid of Pan. Highly respectable citizens
who flee life's pleasures and responsibilities
and keep, with upright hat, upon the midway
of custom, avoiding the right hand and the
left, the ecstasies and the agonies, how sur-
prised they would be if they could hear
their attitude mythologically expressed, and
knew themselves as tooth -chattering ones,
who flee from Nature because they fear the
hand of Nature's God ! Shrilly sound Pan's
pipes ; and behold the banker instantly
concealed in the bank parlour! For to
distrust one's impulses is to be recreant to
Pan.
There are moments when the mind refuses
to be satisfied with evolution, and demands
a ruddier presentation of the sum of man's
experience. Sometimes the mood is brought
about by laughter at the humorous side of
life, as when, abstracting ourselves from
earth, we imagine people plodding on foot,
or seated in ships and speedy trains, with the
Pans Pipes 269
planet all the while whirling in the opposite
direction, so that, for all their hurry, they
travel back-foremost through the universe of
space. Sometimes it comes by the spirit of
delight, and sometimes by the spirit of terror.
At least, there will always be hours when
we refuse to be put off by the feint of
explanation, nicknamed science; and demand
instead some palpitating image of our estate,
that shall represent the troubled and un-
certain element in which we dwell, and
satisfy reason by the means of art. Science
writes of the world as if with the cold finger
of a starfish ; it is all true ; but what is it
when compared to the reality of which it
discourses ? where hearts beat high in April,
and death strikes, and hills totter in the
earthquake, and there is a glamour over all
the objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises
for the ear, and Romance herself has made
her dwelling among men ? So we come
back to the old myth, and hear the goat-
footed piper making the music which is itself
the charm and terror of things ; and when
270 Pans Pipes
a glen invites our visiting footsteps, fancy-
that Pan leads us thither with a gracious
tremolo ; or when our hearts quail at the
thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that
he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.
A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS
/^^ITIES given, the problem was to light
them. How to conduct individual
citizens about the burgess-warren, when once
heaven had withdrawn its leading luminary ?
or — since we live in a scientific age — when
once our spinning planet has turned its back
upon the sun ? The moon, from time to
time, was doubtless very helpful ; the stars
had a cheery look among the chimney-pots ;
and a cresset here and there, on church or
citadel, produced a fine pictorial effect, and,
in places where the ground lay unevenly, held
out the right hand of conduct to the benighted.
But sun, moon, and stars abstracted or con-
cealed, the night -faring inhabitant had to
fall back — we speak on the authority of old
prints — upon stable lanthorns, two stories in
272 A Plea for Gas Lamps
height. Many holes, drilled in the conical
turret-roof of this vagabond Pharos, let up
spouts of dazzlement into the bearer's eyes ;
and as he paced forth in the ghostly dark-
ness, carrying his own sun by a ring about
his finger, day and night swung to and fro
and up and down about his footsteps.
Blackness haunted his path ; he was be-
leaguered by goblins as he went ; and, curfew
being struck, he found no light but that he
travelled in throughout the township.
Closely following on this epoch of migra-
tory lanthorns in a world of extinction, came
the era of oil-lights, hard to kindle, easy to
extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour of
their endurance. Rudely puffed the winds
of heaven ; roguishly clomb up the all-de-
structive urchin ; and, lo ! in a moment night
re-established her void empire, and the cit
groped along the wall, suppered but bedless,
occult from guidance, and sorrily wading in
the kennels. As if gamesome winds and
gamesome youths were not sufficient, it was
the habit to sling these feeble luminaries
A Plea for Gas Lamps 273
from house to house above the fairway.
There, on invisible cordage, let them swing !
And suppose some crane-necked general to
go speeding by on a tail charger, spurring the
destiny of nations, red-hot in expedition,
there would indubitably be some effusion of
military blood, and oaths, and a certain crash
of glass ; and while the chieftain rode for-
ward with a purple coxcomb, the street
would be left to original darkness, unpiloted,
unvoyageable, a province of the desert night.
The conservative, looking before and after,
draws from each contemplation the matter
for content. Out of the age of gas lamps
he glances back slightingly at the mirk and
glimmer in which his ancestors wandered ;
his heart waxes jocund at the contrast ; nor
do his lips refrain from a stave, in the highest
style of poetry, lauding progress and the
golden mean. When gas first spread along
a city, mapping it forth about evenfall for
the eye of observant birds, a new age had
begun for sociality and corporate pleasure-
seeking, and begun with proper circumstance,
274 ^ Plea for Gas Lamps
becoming its own birthright. The work of
Prometheus had advanced by another stride.
Mankind and its supper parties were no
longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-
fog ; sundown no longer emptied the pro-
menade ; and the day was lengthened out to
every man's fancy. The city-folk had stars
of their own ; biddable, domesticated stars.
It is true that these were not so steady,
nor yet so clear, as their originals ; nor indeed
was their lustre so elegant as that of the best
wax candles. But then the gas stars, being
nearer at hand, were more practically effica-
cious than Jupiter himself It is true, again,
that they did not unfold their rays with the
appropriate spontaneity of the planets, coming
out along the firmament one after another,
as the need arises. But the lamplighters
took to their heels every evening, and ran
with a good heart. It was pretty to see
man thus emulating the punctuality of
heaven's orbs ; and though perfection was
not absolutely reached, and now and then an
individual may have been knocked on the
A Plea for Gas Lamps 275
head by the ladder of the flying functionary,
yet people commended his zeal in a proverb,
and taught their children to say, " God bless
the lamplighter !" And since his passage
was a piece of the day's programme, the
children were well pleased to repeat the
benediction, not, of course, in so many
words, which would have been improper, but
in some chaste circumlocution, suitable for
infant lips.
God bless him, indeed ! For the term of
his twilight diligence is near at hand ; and
for not much longer shall we watch him
speeding up the street and, at measured
intervals, knocking another luminous hole
into the dusk. The Greeks would have
made a noble myth of such an one ; how he
distributed starlight, and, as soon as the
need was over, re-collected it ; and the little
bull's-eye, which was his instrument, and
held enough fire to kindle a whole parish,
would have been fitly commemorated in the
legend. Now, like all heroic tasks, his
labours draw towards apotheosis, and in the
2/6 A Plea for Gas Lamps
light of victory himself shall disappear. For
another advance has been effected. Our
tame stars are to come out in future, not
one by one, but all in a body and at once.
A sedate electrician somewhere in a back
office touches a spring — and behold ! from
one end to another of the city, from east to
west, from the Alexandra to the Crystal
Palace, there is light ! Fiat Ltix, says the
sedate electrician. What a spectacle, on
some clear, dark nightfall, from the edge of
Hampstead Hill, when in a moment, in the
twinkling of an eye, the design of the
monstrous city flashes into vision — a glitter-
ing hieroglyph many square miles in extent ;
and when, to borrow and debase an image,
all the evening street-lamps burst together
into song ! Such is the spectacle of the
future, preluded the other day by the experi-
ment in Pall Mall. Star-rise by electricity,
the most romantic flight of civilisation ; the
compensatory benefit for an innumerable
array of factories and bankers' clerks. To
the artistic spirit exercised about Thirlmere,
A Plea f 07' Gas Lamps 27 y
here is a crumb of consolation ; consolatory,
at least, to such of them as look out upon
the world through seeing eyes, and con-
tentedly accept beauty where it comes.
But the conservative, while lauding pro-
gress, is ever timid of innovation ; his is the
hand upheld to counsel pause; his is the
signal advising slow advance. The word
electricity now sounds the note of danger.
In Paris, at the mouth of the Passage des
Princes, in the place before the Opera portico,
and in the Rue Drouot at the Figaro office,
a new sort of urban star now shines out
nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the
human eye ; a lamp for a nightmare ! Such
a light as this should shine only on murders
and public crime, or along the corridors of
lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror.
To look at it only once is to fall in love
with gas, which gives a warm domestic
radiance fit to eat by. Mankind, you would
have thought, might have remained content
with what Prometheus stole for them and
not gone fishing the profound heaven with
278 A Plea for Gas Lamps
kites to catch and domesticate the wildfire
of the storm. Yet here we have the levin
brand at our doors, and it is proposed that
we should henceforward take our walks
abroad in the glare of permanent lightning.
A man need not be very superstitious if he
scruple to follow his pleasures by the light of
the Terror that Flieth, nor very epicurean if
he prefer to see the face of beauty more
becomingly displayed. That ugly blinding
glare may not improperly advertise the
home of slanderous Figaro^ which is a back-
shop to the infernal regions ; but where soft
joys prevail, where people are convoked to
pleasure and the philosopher looks on smiling
and silent, where love and laughter and
deifying wine abound, there, at least, let the
old mild lustre shine upon the ways of man.
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" It is written with a beautiful earnestness and verity that convince the reader
with every sentence he is reading a true history, while the author's wonderful power
of description, his cunning discrimination of character, and his charming English,
combine to make the story irresistihie."— Boston Courier.
THE MERRY MEN,
Ar^d. Other Tales and. Kables.
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CONTENTS : The Merry Men. Chap. I.— Eilean Aros. Chap.
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the Sea. Will o' the Mill. Markheim. Thrawn Janet. Olalla.
The Treasure of Franchard. A story in eight chapters.
" Everything in the collection is worthy of its remarkable author ; in many
respects a writer unique, in certain demesnes of fiction." — Independent.
"• There are intensely dramatic scenes which sustain the interest of the reader, and
a freshness, a novelty of plot which convince him that all the stories have not yet
'boen told.'" — The Churchinnn.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S BOOKS.
NEIV ARABIAN NIGHTS.
i2mo, cloth, $i.oo ; paper, 30 cents.
CONTENTS.
The Suicide Club :— Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts.
Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk. The Adventure
of the Hansom Cabs.
The Rajah's Diamond .-—Siovy of the Bandbox. Story of the Young
Man in Holy Orders. Story of the House with the Green Blinds.
The Adventure of Prince Florizel and a Detective.
The Pavilion on the Links. A Lodging for the Night. The Sire de
Maleiroifs Door. Providence and the Guitar.
THE DYNAMITER.
More New Arabian Nights (with Mrs. Stevenson).
l2mo, cloth, $1.00 ; paper, 30 cents.
CONTENTS.
Prologue of the Cigar Divan— Challoner s Adventure : The Squire of
Barnes— Somerset's Adventtire : The Superfluous Mansion, Narra-
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A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES.
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language, and yet altogether poetical. We do not know anything in the whole range
of English literature to"" equal them in their own peculiar charm. There is a subtle
beauty in them which is indescribable and unequaled."— TA^ Churchman.
UNDERWOODS.
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a.\ox\&."— Pall Mall Gazette.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S BOOKS.
Essays — Literary, Personal, and Miscellaneous
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS.
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Contents : The Foreigners at Home, Some College Memon-s, Old
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VIRGimBUS PUERISQUE,
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These volumes contain delightful essays on a great variety of subjects,
and are marked by the same incisiveness of style and vigor and "nobility
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FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND
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Contents : Victor Hugo's Romances, Some Aspects of Robert
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MEMOIR OF FLEEMINC JENKIN.
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y
Uniform with Obiter Dicta,
ETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS^
BY ANDREW LANG.
/ VoL, Elzevir i6mo, Gilt Top, ^i,oo.
IT is a happy fancy of Mr.
Lang's to unbosom himself
of some of the brightest, wit-
tiest and most thoughtful criti-
cisms of recent years by writing
it directly to the great dead
themselves — always with thor-
ough reverence and apprecia-
tion, and the most charming
regard for their ways of thought,
■ but with perfect frankness. The
public thus gains at second
hand one of the brightest collec-
tions of literary estimates which
any contemporary writer — not
even excepting the author ot
*' Obiter Dicta " — could have
given them. The little Elzevir
volume, with its page and print,
would of itself have appealed to
many of the dead authors, as it
will to modern readers.
CONTENTS.
To W. M. Thackeray.
To Charles Dickens.
To Pierre de Ronzard.
To Herodotus.
Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope.
To Lucien of Samosata.
To Maitre Francoys Rabelais.
To Jane Austen.
To Master Isaak Walton.
To M. Chapelain.
To Sir John Manndeville, Kt.
To Alexandre Dumas.
To Theocritus.
To Edgar Allan Poe.
To Sir Walter Scott, Bart.
To Eusebius of Csesarea.
To Percy Bysshe Shelley.
To Monsieur de Moliere
To Robert Burns.
To Omar Khayyam.
To Q. Horatius Flaccus.
" The book is Gne of the luxuries of
the literary taste. It is meant for the
exquisite palate, and is prepared by one
of the ■■ knowing ' kind. It is an aston-
ishing little volume,"--iV. V, Evenins
" Mr. Andrew Lang is decidedly a
clever and dexterous literary workman,
and we doubt if he has ever done anj'-
thing neater or more finished than
these 'Letters to Dead Authors.'"— 7)4^
Christian Uni<m.
o
BITER DICTA,
(FIRST SERIES.)
"This brilliant and thought-compel-
ling little book. . . . Apart from their
intellectual grip, which we think really-
notable, the great charm of these essays
lies in the fine urbanity of their satirical
humor," — Acadetny.
AUGUSTINE BIRRELL.
/ Vol., Elzevir i6mo.
Gilt Top, $1,00,
CONTENTS.
Carlyle.
On the Alleged Obscurity of Mr.
Browning's Poetry.
Truth-Hunting.
Actors.
A Rogue's Memoirs.
The Via Media.
Falstaff.
" A very dainty little book — daintily
written, daintily printed, and daintily
bound. The author has a fine turn of
style, a very pretty wit, a solid and
manly vein of reflection. . . . An
eminently pleasant and companionable
book. Open it where we may, we find
something to entertain and stimulate,
to invite meditation, and provoke re-
flection."— Times.
"Some admirably written essays. . . .
Amvising and brilliant. . . . The book
is the book of a highly cultivated man,
with a real gift of expression, a good
d£al of humor, a happy fancy, an im-
aginative respect for religion, and a
rather skeptical bias." — Spectator.
" Each essay is a gem of thought — not
of heavy, ponderous, didactic thought,
but of thought light, fanciful, and play-
ful, yet conveying much wisdom." —
Standard.
"The author is evidently a man of
considerable reading, with opinions of
his own, which he can express with
vigor and humor. . . . The book is
very readable and suggestive." — St.
yames's Gazette.
" A book to be enjoyed precisely be-
cause of the irresponsibility which its
clever author successfully affects. . . .
We trust this is only the first of many
such books, for the author of Obiter
Dicta has it in him to delight his gen-
eration for long years to come with
writing as little commonplace and as
abounding in point and wit as any that
has been seen in a bookseller's shop
since his favorite Charles Lamb ceased
to button-hole and fascinate English
mankind." — Liverpool Daily Post.
" Such work as this needs no name
to carry it ; its qualifications appear on
the surface, and not only solicit, but
command attention and hearing. It is
a book which will interest and delight
all lovers of good writing, and especial-
ly all those who enjoy contact with a
fresh, suggestive, incisive thinker," —
T/ie Christian Union.
"A collection of papers of which, per-
haps, the most obvious quality is its lit-
erary quality. The book is neat, ap-
posite, clever, full of quaint allusions,
happy thoughts, and apt unfamiliar quo-
tations."— Boston Advertiser.
" The essays are all cleverly written.
There is an air of ease and restfulnesfl
about them that is quite refreshing," —
Brooklyn Times.
" The book is pervaded bjr freshness,
manliness, fine feeling, and intellectual
integrity." — New York Times.
" Charmingly written, and always
eminently readable." — Philadelphia
Record.
" The little volume is a delightful one,
and its essays are written with great
charm of style and winning frankness.
The book is full of pleasant and refined
reading for all people of cultivated
tastes." — Boston Saturday Evening
Gazette.
"The tone and spirit of the essays are
admirable ; there is no attempt at ped-
antry, no painful display of contorted
wit; the essays resemble the careful
conversation of a cultured gentleman,
and they are thoroughly fresh and en-
tertaining."— Buffalo Times.
"The book Is remarkable for a light-
ness of touch and vivacity worthy of
the best French writers, as well as for a
fundamental tone of good sense that is
all English." — The Exaininer.
"The writer ofthis volume represents
the best criticism of the day. He would
apply his principles to every art of ex-
pression, and to every habit of thinking.
He would have all mental processes
brought before the reason for its judg-
ment. Everywhere is evinced a strong
artistic sense. Consistency and sym-
metry are insisted upon in the develop-
ment and employment of thought. The
book is wisely written, and it deserves
to be wisely read." — Bostoji Transcript.
" Wit, tenderness, delivery, and dis-
cerning criticism are combined in an un-
usual degree, and the letters, taken as a
eroup, constitute one of the freshest and
most pleasing series of literary essays
printed for many a day." — Boston
Journal.
"The topics of these letters indicate a
scholarly study, and are handled with a
vivacity which, extending from the
grave to the gay, makes the volume an
instructive and charming literary com-
panion."— Chicago Interior,
o
BITER DICTA.
(SECOND SERIES.)
AUGUSTINE BIRRELL.
/ Vol., Elzevir i6tno.
Gilt Top, $1,00.
CONTENTS.
Milton.
Pope.
Johnson.
Burke.
The Muse of History.
Charles Lamb.
Emerson.
The Office of Literature.
Worn-out Types.
Cambridge and the Poets.
Book-buying.
The remarkable reception which was
accorded to the first series of this work,
and the large sale which it met with
in all parts of the country, almost
immediately on publication, warrants
the belief thai a still larger demand
will arise for the second series. The
subjects treated of in the secottd series
of OBITER DICTA have a per7uanent
interest ; and are such as will draw
special attention in consequence of
many of them having been under recent
discussion.
RANK R. Stockton's Writings.
NEIV UNIFORM EDITION.
THE BEE-MAN OF ORN, a^td Other Fanciful Tales.
THE LADY, OR THE TIGER? and Other Stories,
THE CHRISTMAS WRECK, and Other Stories.
THE LATE MRS. NULL.
RUDDER GRANGE.
RUDDER GRANGE. New Illustrated Edition. With
over loo Illustrations by A. B. Frost. Square i2mo,
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THE LADY, OR THE TIGER? and Other Stories.
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THE CHRISTMAS WRECK, and Other Stories. i2mo,
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RUDDER GRANGE. i2mo, paper, 60 cents.
A JOLLY FELLOWSHIP. Illustrated, i2mo,p.^o.
THE STORY OF VITEAU. Illustrated, i2mo, $1.^0.
THE TING-A-LING TALES. Illustrated, i2mo, $1 .00.
THE FLOATING PRINCE, and Other Fairy Tales.
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ROUNDABOUT RAMBLES IN LANDS OF FACT
AND FANCY. Illustrated, 4to, boards, p.^o.
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CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers,
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